The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  He lit the pipe with a plastic butane lighter and walked toward the cabin, puffing. Thomas Cornstalk followed, rather reluctantly. He didn’t like this, but he would have followed Charlie Badwater to hell. Which, of course, might very well be where they were about to go.

  Charlie Badwater pointed the stem of the pipe at the shimmering wall of light that blocked their way. Four times he blew smoke at the barrier, long dense streams of bluish white smoke that curled and eddied back strangely as they hit the bright curtain. On the fourth puff there was a sharp cracking sound and suddenly the curtain was gone and the humming stopped and there was only a weed-grown clearing and a tumbledown gray board shack badly in need of a new roof. Somewhere nearby a bird began singing, as if relieved.

  “Asuh,” Thomas Cornstalk murmured in admiration.

  “Make me think, I’ll teach you that one some time,” Charlie Badwater said. “It’s not hard, once you learn the song … well, let’s have a look around.”

  They walked slowly toward the cabin. There wasn’t much to see. The yard was littered with an amazing assortment of junk—broken crockery and rusting pots and pans, chicken feathers and unidentifiable bones, bottles and cans, a wrecked chair with stuffing coming out of the cushions—but none of it suggested anything except that you wouldn’t want Old Man Alabama living next door. A big pile of turtle shells lay on the sagging front porch. There was a rattlesnake skin nailed above the door.

  “No smoke,” Charlie Badwater said, studying the chimney. “Reckon he’s gone? Well, one way to find out.”

  He stepped up onto the porch and turned to look back at Thomas Cornstalk, who hadn’t moved. “Coming?”

  “You go,” Thomas Cornstalk said. “I’ll wait out here for you. If it’s all the same to you.” He wouldn’t have gone inside that cabin for a million dollars and a lifetime ticket to the Super Bowl. “Need to work on my tan,” he added.

  Charlie Badwater chuckled and disappeared through the cabin door. There was no sound of voices or anything else from within, so Thomas Cornstalk figured he must have been right about Old Man Alabama being gone. That didn’t make much sense; why would the old maniac have put up such a fancy protective spell if he wasn’t going to be inside? Come to think of it, how could he have laid on that barrier from the outside? As far as Thomas Cornstalk knew, a spell like that had to be worked from inside the protective circle. But nothing about this made any sense.…

  Charlie Badwater’s laugh came through the open cabin door. “You’re not going to believe this,” he called. “I don’t believe it myself.”

  “What did you find?” Thomas Cornstalk said as Charlie came back out.

  “About what you’d expect, mostly. A whole bunch of weird stuff piled every which way and hanging from the ceiling, all of it dirty as a pigpen and stinking so bad you can hardly breathe in there. Nothing unusual—considering who and what lives here—except these.”

  He held up a stack of books. Thomas Cornstalk stared. “Books?” he said in amazement. “What’s Old Man Alabama doing with books? I know for a fact he can’t read.”

  “Who knows? Maybe got them to wipe his ass with. Ran out of pine cones or whatever he uses.” Charlie Badwater sat down on the edge of the porch and began flipping through the books. “Looks like he stole them from the school over at Rocky Mountain. Old bastard’s a sneak thief on top of everything else.”

  “What kind of books are they? The kind with pictures of women? Maybe he’s been out in the woods by himself too long.”

  “No, look, this is a history book. And this one has a bunch of pictures of old-time sailing ships, like in the pirate movies. Now why in the world—”

  Charlie Badwater sat staring at the books for a couple of minutes, and then he tossed them aside and stood up. “I’m going to look around some more,” he said.

  Thomas Cornstalk followed him as he walked around the cabin. The area in back of the cabin looked much the same as the front yard, but then both men saw the blackened spot where a small fire had been burning. Large rocks had been placed in a circle around the fire place, and some of the rocks were marked with strange symbols or patterns. A tiny wisp of smoke, no greater than that from a cigarette, curled up from the ashes.

  Charlie Badwater walked over and held his hand above the ashes, not quite touching the remains of the fire. Then he crouched way down and began studying the ground closely, slowly examining the entire area within the circle of stones and working his way back toward where Thomas Cornstalk stood silently watching. This was one of Charlie Badwater’s most famous specialties: reading sign. People said he could track a catfish across a lake.

  “He came out here,” he said at last, “barefoot as usual, and he walked straight to that spot by the fire and walked around it—at least four times, it’s pretty confused there—and then, well…”

  “What? Where’d he go?”

  “Far as I can tell, he just flew away. Or disappeared or something. He didn’t walk back out of that circle of rocks, anyway. And whatever he did, it wasn’t long ago that he did it. Those ashes are still warm.”

  A small dry voice said, “Looking for the old man?”

  Thomas Cornstalk turned around. A great big blue jay was sitting on the collapsing eaves of Old Man Alabama’s shack.

  “Because,” the jay said, speaking in that sarcastic way jays have, “I don’t think you’re going to find him. Not anytime soon, anyway. He left sort of drastic.”

  “Did you see what happened?” Thomas Cornstalk asked the jay.

  Charlie Badwater had turned around too by now. He was looking from Thomas Cornstalk to the jay and back again. There was an odd look on his face; he seemed almost wistful. For all his power, all the fantastic things he could do, he had never been granted the ability to talk with animals—which is not something you can learn; you have the gift or you don’t—and there are few things that can make a person feel quite as shut out as watching somebody like Thomas Cornstalk having a conversation with bird or beast.

  “Hey,” the jay said, “I got trapped in here when the old son of a bitch put that whatever-the-hell around the cabin. Tried to fly out, hit something like a wall in the air, damn near broke my beak. Thought I was going to starve to death in here, till you guys showed up. Tell your buddy thanks for turning the damn thing off.”

  “Ask him where Old Man Alabama went,” Charlie Badwater said.

  “I saw the whole thing,” the jay said, not waiting for the translation. Thomas Cornstalk noticed that; he had suspected for some time that blue jays could understand Cherokee, even if they pretended not to. “Old guy walked out there mumbling to himself, stomped around the fire a little, made a lot of that racket that you humans call singing—hey, no offense, but even a boat-tailed grackle can sing better than that—and then all of a sudden he threw a bunch of stuff on the fire. There was a big puff of smoke and when it cleared away he was just as gone as you please.”

  “I knew it,” Charlie Badwater said, when this had been interpreted for him. He squatted down by the fire and began picking up handfuls of ashes and blackened twigs and dirt, running the material through his fingers and sniffing it like a dog and occasionally putting a pinch in his mouth to taste it. “Ah,” he said finally. “All right, I know what he used. Don’t understand why—there are some combinations in there that shouldn’t work at all, by any of the rules I know—but like I said, what works is what works.”

  He stood up and looked at the jay. “Ask him if he can remember the song.”

  “Sure,” the jay said. “No problem. Not sure I can sing it, of course—”

  “I’ll be right back,” Charlie Badwater said, heading for the cabin. A minute later Thomas Cornstalk heard him rummaging around inside. The jay said, “Was it something I said?”

  In a little while Charlie Badwater came back, his arms full of buckskin bags and brown paper sacks. “Lucky for us he had plenty of everything,” he said, and squatted down on the ground and took off his old black hat and turned it upside
down on his knees and began taking things out of the bags: mostly dried leaves and weeds and roots, but other items too, not all of them easily identifiable. At one point Thomas Cornstalk was nearly certain he recognized a couple of human finger bones.

  “All right,” Charlie Badwater said, setting the hat carefully next to the dead fire and straightening up. “Now how does that song go?”

  That part wasn’t easy. The jay had a great deal of trouble forming some of the sounds; a crow would have been better at this, or maybe a mockingbird. The words weren’t in any language Thomas Cornstalk had ever heard, and Charlie Badwater said he’d never heard a song remotely like this one.

  At last, after many false starts and failed tries, Charlie Badwater got all the way through the song and the jay said, “That’s it. He’s got it perfect. No accounting for tastes, I guess.”

  Charlie Badwater was already piling up sticks from the pile of wood beside the ring of stones. He got out his lighter and in a few minutes the fire was crackling and flickering away. “Ehena,” he said over his shoulder. “Ready when you are.”

  “You want me in on this?”

  “Of course. Let’s go, Thomas. Nula.”

  Thomas Cornstalk wasn’t at all happy about this, but he walked across the circle to stand beside Charlie Badwater, who had picked up his hat and was holding it in front of him in both hands.

  “This I’ve got to see,” the jay commented from its perch on the roof. It had moved up to the ridgepole, probably for a better view. “You guys are crazier than the old man.”

  Charlie Badwater circled the fire four times, counterclockwise, like a stomp dancer, with Thomas Cornstalk pacing nervously behind him. After the fourth orbit he stopped, facing the sun, and began singing the song the jay had taught him. It sounded different now, somehow. The hair was standing up on Thomas Cornstalk’s neck and arms.

  Suddenly Charlie Badwater emptied the hat’s contents onto the fire. There was a series of sharp fizzing and sputtering noises, and a big cloud of dense gray smoke surged up and surrounded both men. It was so thick that Thomas Cornstalk couldn’t see an inch in front of his face; it was like having his head under very muddy water, or being covered with a heavy gray blanket.

  Other things were happening, too. The ground underfoot was beginning to shift and become soft; it felt like quicksand, yet he wasn’t sinking into it. His skin prickled all over, not painfully but pretty unpleasantly, and he felt a little sick to his stomach.

  The grayness got darker and darker, while the ground fell away completely, until Thomas Cornstalk felt himself to be floating through a great black nothingness. For some reason he was no longer frightened; he simply assumed that he had died and this was what it was like when you went to the spirit world. “Ni, Jail,” he called out.

  “Ayuh ahni, Tami.” The voice sounded close by, but strange, as if Charlie Badwater had fallen down a well.

  “Gado nidagal’ stani? What’s going to happen?”

  “Nigal’stisguh,” came the cheerful reply. “Whatever…”

  * * *

  Thomas Cornstalk had no idea how long the darkness and the floating sensation lasted. His sense of time, the whole idea of time itself, had vanished in that first billow of smoke. But then suddenly the darkness turned to dazzling light and there was something solid under his feet again. Caught by surprise, he swayed and staggered and fell heavily forward, barely getting his arms up in time to protect his face.

  He lay half-stunned for a moment, getting the breath back into his lungs and the sight back to his eyes. There was hard smooth planking against his hands; it felt like his own cabin floor, in fact, and at first he thought he must somehow be back home. Maybe the whole thing was a dream and he’d just fallen out of bed … but he rolled over and saw bright blue sky above him, crisscrossed by a lot of ropes and long poles. He sat up and saw that he was on the deck of a ship.

  It was a ship such as he had only seen in books and movies: the old-fashioned kind, made of wood, with masts and sails instead of an engine. Off beyond the railing, blue water stretched unbroken to the horizon.

  Beside him, Charlie Badwater’s voice said, “Well, I have to admit this wasn’t what I expected.”

  Thomas Cornstalk turned his head in time to see Charlie Badwater getting to his feet. That seemed like a good idea, so he did it too. The deck was tilted to one side and the whole ship was rolling and pitching, gently but distinctly, with the motion of the sea. Thomas Cornstalk’s stomach began to feel a trifle queasy. He hadn’t been aboard a ship since his long-ago hitch in the marines, but he remembered about seasickness. He closed his eyes for a second and forced his stomach to settle down. This was no time to lose control of any part of himself.

  He said, “Where the hell are we, Charlie?”

  From behind them came a harsh cackle. “Where? Wrong question.”

  The words were in English. The voice was dry and high-pitched, with an old man’s quaver. Both men said, “Oh, shit,” and turned around almost in unison.

  Old Man Alabama was standing on the raised deck at the stern of the ship, looking down at them. His arms were folded and his long hair streamed and fluttered in the wind. His mouth was pulled back at the corners in the closest thing to a smile Thomas Cornstalk had ever seen on his face.

  “Not where,” he went on, and cackled again. “You ought to ask, when are we? Of course there’s some where in it too—”

  The horrible smile disappeared all at once. “Say,” Old Man Alabama said in a different voice, “how did you two get here, anyway?”

  “Same way you did,” Charlie Badwater said, also in English. “It wasn’t very hard.”

  “You’re a liar.” Old Man Alabama spat hard on the deck. “It took me years to learn the secret. How could you two stupid Cherokees—”

  “A little bird told us,” Thomas Cornstalk interrupted. He knew it was too easy but he couldn’t resist.

  “I used the same routine you did,” Charlie Badwater said, “only I put in a following-and-finding igawesdi. You ought to have known you couldn’t lose me, old man. What are you up to, anyway?”

  Old Man Alabama unfolded his long arms and waved them aimlessly about. It made him look remarkably like a spider monkey Thomas Cornstalk had seen in the Tulsa zoo.

  “Crazy Old Man Alabama,” he screeched. “I know what you all said about me behind my back—”

  “Hey,” Charlie Badwater said, “I said it to your face too. Plenty of times.”

  “Loony old witch,” Old Man Alabama went on, ignoring him. “Up there on his mountain, doing nickel-and-dime hexes and love charms, comes into town every now and then and scares the little kids, couldn’t witch his way out of a wet paper sack. Yeah, well, look what the crazy old man went and did.”

  He stopped and shook himself all over. “I did it, too,” he said. His voice had suddenly gone softer; it was hard to understand the words. “Nobody else ever even tried it, but I did it. Me.”

  He stared down at them for a minute, evidently waiting for them to ask him what exactly he’d done. When they didn’t, he threw his hands way up over his head again and put his head back and screamed, “Time! I found out how to fly through time! Look around you, damn it—they don’t have ships like this in the year we come from. Don’t you know what you’re looking at, here?”

  Thomas Cornstalk was already glancing up and down the empty decks, up into the rigging and … empty decks? “What the hell,” he said. “What happened to the people? The sailors and all?”

  “Right,” Charlie Badwater said. “You didn’t sail this thing out here by yourself. Hell, you can’t even paddle a canoe. I’ve seen you try.”

  Old Man Alabama let off another of his demented laughs. “There,” he said, gesturing out over the rail. “There they are, boys. Fine crew they make now, huh?”

  Thomas Cornstalk looked where the old man was pointing, but he couldn’t see anything but the open sea and sky and a bunch of seagulls squawking and flapping around above the ship’s wak
e. Then he got it. “Aw, hell,” he said. “You didn’t.”

  “Should have been here a little while ago,” Old Man Alabama chortled, “when they were still learning how to fly. Two of them crashed into the water and a shark got them. Hee hee.”

  “But why?” Charlie Badwater said. “I mean, the part about traveling into the past, okay, I hate to admit it but I’m impressed. But then fooling around with this kind of childishness, turning a lot of poor damn sailors into sea birds? I know you hate white people, but—”

  “Hah! Not just any bunch of sailors,” Old Man Alabama said triumphantly. “Not just any white people, either. This is where it all started, you dumb blanket-asses! And I’m the one who went back and fixed it!”

  He began to sing, a dreadful weird keening that rose and fell over a four-tone scale, without recognizable words. Charlie Badwater and Thomas Cornstalk looked at each other and then back at the old man. Thomas Cornstalk said, “You mean this ship—”

  “Yes! It’s old Columbus’s ship! Now the white bastards won’t come at all!” Old Man Alabama’s face was almost glowing. “And it was me, me, me that stopped them. Poor cracked Old Man Alabama, turns out to be the greatest Indian in history, that’s all—”

  “Uh, excuse me,” Thomas Cornstalk said, “but if this is Columbus’s ship, where are the other two?”

  “Other two what?” Old Man Alabama asked irritably.

  “Other two ships, you old fool,” Charlie Badwater said. “Columbus had three ships.”

  “That’s right,” Thomas Cornstalk agreed. “I remember from school.”

  Old Man Alabama was looking severely pissed off. “Are you sure? Damn it, I went to a lot of trouble to make sure I got the right one. Gave this white kid from Tahlequah a set of bear claws and a charm to make his girlfriend put out—little bastard drove a hard bargain—for finding me the picture in that book. Told me what year it was and everything. I’m telling you, this is it.” Old Man Alabama stomped his bare feet on the deck. “Columbus’s ship. The Mayflower.”