The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  outshines the bright galaxy.

  spraying iron, salt: us

  Warm fireflies float

  amid the midnight showers:

  blaze and drop, then gone

  Hoard scant hydrogen

  against the final darkness:

  stars, like leaves, turn red

  A jack o'lantern

  Hisses on its black sky loam:

  baleful, squat, too red

  I leave to you the discovery of the astrophysical concepts used metaphorically in each haiku, but note that both sequences conclude with the word red as a combination of coincidence and contest design.

  Three hundred persons—150 from Zwicky, a like number from Annie—selected the winning sequence in a blind electronic vote, Sharif triumphing 167 to 132. (Attribute the lost vote to an abstainer who adjudged both sequences “insufficiently imaginative” to bother choosing.) But I take some consolation from the fact that, in a separate vote, my haiku for summer was the overall favorite.

  And then Epsilon Eridani Days, an entertaining success in nearly every way, concluded.

  Once again, every member of our great expedition must face the realities of our present circumstances and the obligations of our choices.

  * * *

  Among my friends and acquaintances, Milo Pask, Etsuko Endo, Indira Sescharchari, Masoud Nadeq, and my arkboard lover, Lily Aliosi-Stark, have chosen to transfer to Roosenno’s ark to wait for the dust cloud from Epimenides to settle. The defection that stings most painfully, of course, is the last.

  “Abel, I’ve been down-phase in umpity-ump extended comas here on Annie,” Lily told me a few hours ago. “I could handle another U-nap or two, but after I come up-phase again, I want to stay up-phase. I want to get on with my life. Is that so selfish a wish?”

  “No more than my own,” I said. “What about Dean?”

  “We made him together, Abel, but he’s yours. You have his life in your hands—insofar as any of us has control out here—and I expect you to do right by him.”

  “He’s going with me.”

  “Of course he is. Nothing else makes sense. But I still expect you to do right by him.”

  “I won’t let him forget you.”

  “That’s one right thing you can try, but sooner or later he’ll forget. Don’t force him to remember. I won’t mind if I’m just a nagging piece of grit in his memory. Eventually, if he has you to count on, that’s all I should be.”

  “What crap,” I said. “You sound like Joan of Arc praying amidst the flames.”

  For an instant, Lily’s gaze darkened. Then she began to laugh. “I do, don’t I? Well, good for me.”

  * * *

  Using Colombo tethers and transfer dinghies, those leaving Annie carried their bodies across to Zwicky, sundering their souls from ours. But before these leavetakings, we took our melancholy last farewells. Dean, Kaz, and I met with Lily at the G-Tower docking station.

  “It’s like you guys’re dying,” Lily told us. “I’ll never see you—any of you—again.”

  I kissed Lily. Hard. I kissed her again, caressing her hair. When I let go, Dean—DeBoy, as Lily had always called him—clung to her like a sorrowful young orang. If Kaz had not distracted him, she would have probably had to have emergency surgery to pry him loose.

  Later, I watched from the G-Tower observatory as Lily and the others made their slow-motion glides across to or over from Zwicky. It seemed to me, though, that the dinghy containing my lover drew across the dark with it, in a harness of fireflies, a vein from my own clamoring heart.

  A delusion, of course; a trick of the vacuum.

  Nonetheless, it made me remember a haiku that Ghulam Sharif had written in the wake of our contest and sent over to me with a friend as a parting gift:

  Iron cinders of stars

  cool in expanding darkness:

  too late for regrets

  “Guh-bye!” cried Dean, one hand on the viewport. “Guh-bye, Mama!”

  Odenwald had okayed Dean’s presence upstairs, and as his doting goduncle, Kaz had carried him up—for, under the present circumstances, kids had plenty of business in the observatory. Plenty.

  “Guh-bye, guh-bye! Holy crow!”

  Without Lily bodily before him, DeBoy truly understood only that Annie Jump Cannon was going on another long trip and that he was going with.

  —with thanks to Geoffrey A. Landis

  THE SAWING BOYS

  Howard Waldrop

  Howard Waldrop is widely considered to be one of the best short-story writers in the business, and his famous story “The Ugly Chickens” won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Awards in 1981. His work has been gathered in three collections: Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, and Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories By Howard Waldrop, with more collections in the works. Waldrop is also the author of the novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999, in collaboration with Jake Saunders, and of two solo novels, Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs. He is at work on a new novel, tentatively entitled The Moon World. His stories have appeared in our First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Annual Collections. Waldrop lives in Austin, Texas.

  Certainly nobody other than Waldrop would ever have come up with the wild and funny story that follows, in which a classic European fairy tale is retold in a distinctly American way—with a generous dollop of Damon Runyon thrown in for flavor …

  There was a place in the woods where three paths came together and turned into one big path heading south.

  A bearded man in a large straw hat and patched bib overalls came down one. Over his shoulder was a tow sack, and out of it stuck the handle of a saw. The man had a long wide face and large thin ears.

  Down the path to his left came a short man in butternut pants and a red checkerboard shirt that said Ralston-Purina Net Wt. 20 lbs. on it. He had on a bright red cloth cap that stood up on the top of his head. Slung over his back was a leather strap; hanging from it was a big ripsaw.

  On the third path were two people, one of whom wore a yellow-and-black-striped shirt, and had a mustache that stood straight out from the sides of his nose. The other man was dressed in a dark brown barn coat. He had a wrinkled face, and wore a brown Mackenzie cap down from which the earflaps hung, even though it was a warm morning. The man with the mustache carried a narrow folding ladder; the other carried a two-man bucksaw.

  The first man stopped.

  “Hi yew!” he said in the general direction of the other two paths.

  “Howdee!” said the short man in the red cap.

  “Well, well, well!” said the man with the floppy-eared hat, putting down his big saw.

  “Weow!” said the man with the wiry mustache.

  They looked each other over, keeping their distance, eyeing each others’ clothing and saws.

  “Well, I guess we know where we’re all headed,” said the man with the brown Mackenzie cap.

  “I reckon,” said the man in the straw hat. “I’m Luke Apuleus, from over Cornfield County way. I play the crosscut.”

  “I’m Rooster Joe Banty,” said the second. “I’m a ripsaw bender myself.”

  “I’m Felix Horbliss,” said the man in stripes with the ladder. “That thar’s Cave Canem. We play this here big bucksaw.”

  They looked at each other some more.

  “I’m to wonderin’,” said Luke, bringing his toe sack around in front of him. “I’m wonderin’ if’n we know the same tunes. Seems to me it’d be a shame to have to play agin’ each other if’n we could help it.”

  “You-all know ‘Trottin’ Gertie Home’?” asked Felix.

  Luke and Rooster Joe nodded.

  “How about ‘When the Shine comes Out’n the Dripper’?” asked Rooster Joe.

  The others nodded.

  “How are you on ‘Snake Handler’s Two-Step’?” asked Luke Apuleus. More nods.

  “Well, that’s a start on it,” said Cave Canem. “We can talk about it on the way there. I be
t we’d sound right purty together.”

  So side by side by bucksaw and ladder, they set out down the big path south.

  * * *

  What we are doing is, we are walking down this unpaved road. How we have come to be walking down this unpaved road is a very long and tiresome story that I should not bore you with.

  We are being Chris the Shoemaker, who is the brains of this operation, and a very known guy aback where we come from, which is south of Long Island, and Large Jake and Little Willie, who are being the brawn, and Miss Millie Dee Chantpie, who is Chris the Shoemaker’s doll, and who is always dressed to the nines, and myself, Charlie Perro, whose job it is to remind everyone what their job is being.

  “I am astounded as all get-out,” says Little Willie, “that there are so many places with no persons in them nowise,” looking around at the trees and bushes and such. “We have seen two toolsheds which looked as if they once housed families of fourteen, but of real-for-true homes, I am not seeing any.”

  “Use your glims for something besides keeping your nose from sliding into your eyebrows,” says Chris the Shoemaker. “You will have seen the sign that said one of the toolcribs is the town of Podunk, and the other shed is the burg of Shtetl. I am believing the next one we will encounter is called Pratt Falls. I am assuming it contains some sort of trickle of fluid, a stunning and precipitous descent in elevation, established by someone with the aforementioned surname.”

  He is called Chris the Shoemaker because that is now his moniker, and he once hung around shoestores. At that time the cobbler shops was the place where the policy action was hot, and before you can be saying Hey Presto! there is Chris the Shoemaker in a new loud suit looking like a comet, and he is the middle guy between the shoemakers and the elves that rig the policy.

  “Who would have thought it?” asked Little Willie, “both balonies on the rear blowing at the same time, and bending up the frammus, and all the push and pull running out? I mean, what are the chances?”

  Little Willie is called that because he is the smaller of the two brothers. Large Jake is called that because, oh my goodness, is he large. He is so large that people have confused him for nightfall—they are standing on the corner shooting the breeze with some guys, and suddenly all the light goes away, and so do the other guys. There are all these cigarettes dropping to the pavement where guys used to be, and the person looks around and Whoa! it is not night at all, it is only Large Jake.

  For two brothers they do not look a thing alike. Little Willie looks, you should excuse the expression, like something from the family Rodentia, whereas Large Jake is a very pleasant-looking individual, only the pleasant is spread across about three feet of mook.

  Miss Millie Dee Chantpie is hubba-hubba stuff (only Chris the Shoemaker best not see you give her more than one Long Island peek) and the talk is she used to be a roving debutante. Chris has the goo-goo eyes for her, and she is just about a whiz at the new crossword puzzles, which always give Little Willie a headache when he tries to do one.

  Where we are is somewhere in the state of Kentucky, which I had not been able to imagine had I not seen it yesterday from the train. Why we were here was for a meet with this known guy who runs a used furniture business on South Wabash Street in Chi City. The meet was to involve lots of known guys, and to be at some hunting lodge in these hills outside Frankfort, where we should not be bothered by prying eyes. Only first the train is late, and the jalopy we bought stalled on us in the dark, and there must have been this wrong turn somewhere, and the next thing you are knowing the balonies blow and we are playing in the ditch and gunk and goo are all over the place.

  So here we are walking down this (pardon the expression) road, and we are looking for a phone and a mechanically inclined individual, and we are not having such a hot time of it.

  “You will notice the absence of wires,” said Chris the Shoemaker, “which leads me to believe we will not find no blower at this watery paradise of Pratt Falls.”

  “Christ Almighty, I’m gettin’ hungry!” says Miss Millie Dee Chantpie of a sudden. She is in this real flapper outfit, with a bandeau top and fringes, and is wearing pearls that must have come out of oysters the size of freight trucks.

  “If we do not soon find the object of our quest,” says Chris the Shoemaker, “I shall have Large Jake blow you the head off a moose, or whatever they have in place of cows out here.”

  It being a meet, we are pretty well rodded up, all except for Chris, who had to put on his Fall Togs last year on Bargain Day at the courthouse and do a minute standing on his head, so of course he can no longer have an oscar anywhere within a block of his person, so Miss Millie Dee Chantpie carries his cannon in one of her enchanting little reticules.

  Large Jake is under an even more stringent set of behavioral codes, but he just plain does not care, and I do not personally know any cops or even the Sammys who are so gauche as to try to frisk him without first calling out the militia. Large Jake usually carries a powder wagon—it is the kind of thing they use on mad elephants or to stop runaway locomotives only it is sawed off on both ends to be only about a foot long.

  Little Willie usually carries a sissy rod, only it is a dumb gat so there is not much commotion when he uses it—just the sound of air coming out of it, and then the sound of air coming out of whomsoever he uses it on. Little Willie has had a date to Ride Old Sparky before, only he was let out on a technical. The technical was that the judge had not noticed the big shoe box full of geetas on the corner of his desk before he brought the gavel down.

  I am packing my usual complement of calibers which (I am prouder than anything to say) I have never used. They are only there for the bulges for people to ogle at while Chris the Shoemaker is speaking.

  Pratt Falls is another couple of broken boards and a sign saying Feed and Seed. There was this dry ditch with a hole with a couple of rocks in it.

  “It was sure no Niagara,” says Little Willie, “that’s for certain.”

  At the end of the place was a sign, all weathered out except for the part that said 2 MILES.

  We are making this two miles in something less than three-quarters of an hour because it is mostly uphill and our dogs are barking, and Miss Millie Dee Chantpie, who has left her high heels in the flivver, is falling off the sides of her flats very often.

  We are looking down into what passes for a real live town in these parts.

  “This is the kind of place,” says Little Willie, “where when you are in the paper business, and you mess up your double sawbuck plates, and print a twenty-one-dollar bill, you bring it here and ask for change. And the guy at the store will look in the drawer and ask you if two nines and a three will do.”

  “Ah, but look, gentlemen and lady,” says Chris the Shoemaker, “there are at least two wires coming down over the mountain into this metropolis, and my guess is that they are attached to civilization at the other end.”

  “I do not spy no filling station,” I says. “But there does seem to be great activity for so early of a morning.” I am counting houses. “More people are already in town than live here.”

  “Perhaps the large gaudy sign up ahead will explain it,” says Little Willie. The sign is being at an angle where another larger dirt path comes into town. From all around on the mountains I can see people coming in in wagons and on horses and on foot.

  We get to the sign. This is what it says, I kid you not:

  BIG HARMONY CONTEST!

  BRIMMYTOWN SQUARE SAT MAY 16

  $50 FIRST PRIZE

  Brought to you by Watkins Products

  and CARDUI, Makers of BLACK DRAUGHT

  Extra! Sacred Harp Singing

  Rev. Shapenote and the Mt. Sinai Choir.

  “Well, well,” says Chris. “Looks like there’ll be plenty of étrangers in this burg. We get in there, make the call on the meet, get someone to fix the jalopy, and be on our way. We should fit right in.”

  While Chris the Shoemaker is saying this, he is adjusting his
orange-and-pink tie and shooting the cuffs on his purple-and-white pinstripe suit. Little Willie is straightening his pumpkin-colored, double-breasted suit and brushing the dust off his yellow spats. Large Jake is dressed in a pure white suit with a black shirt and white tie, and has on a white fedora with a thin black band. Miss Millie Dee Chantpie swirls her fringes and rearranges the ostrich feather in her cloche. I feel pretty much like a sparrow among peacocks.

  “Yeah,” I says, looking over the town, “they’ll probably never notice we been here.”

  * * *

  They made their way into town and went into a store. They bought themselves some items, and went out onto the long, columned verandah of the place, and sat down on some nail kegs, resting their saws and ladders against the porch railings.

  Cave Canem had a big five-cent RC Cola and a bag of Tom’s Nickel Peanuts. He took a long drink of the cola, tore the top off the celluloid bag, and poured the salted peanuts into the neck of the bottle. The liquid instantly turned to foam and overflowed the top, which Canem put into his mouth. When it settled down, he drank from the bottle and chewed on the peanuts that came up the neck.

  Rooster Joe took off his red cap. He had a five-cent Moon Pie the size of a dinner plate and took bites off that.

  Horbliss had a ten-cent can of King Oscar Sardines. The key attached to the bottom broke off at the wrong place. Rather than tearing his thumb up, he took out his pocketknife and cut the top of the can off and peeled the ragged edge back. He drank off the oil, smacking his lips, then took out the sardines between his thumb and the knife blade and ate them.

  Luke had bought a two-foot length of sugarcane and was sucking on it, spitting out the fine slivers which came away in his mouth.

  They ate in silence and watched the crowds go by, clumps of people breaking away and eddying into the stores and shops. At one end of town, farmers stopped their wagons and began selling the produce. From the other end, at the big open place where the courthouse would be if Brimmytown were the county seat, music started up.