The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  And they couldn’t find Mama, just pieces of her ‘cause the supervisors had thrown a grenade and she’d caught it and it had blown up before she could throw it away. Papa’s face was so still. And I knew he was dead, gone, and everything I ever wanted from him seemed small, and I seemed small. Damn you, I wanted to say then. Damn you for leaving me. I never wanted that. Fuck the miners. Fuck the supervisors.

  And the dragon was dead. My ticket away. And Gray was standing there, shrouded like he was dead. “Fuck you! Goddamn you, Gray! Goddamn you Sara! Fuck you! Fuck this boat! Fuck the dragon! Fuck all of you!”

  I just stood there, swearing, and I wanted to pick up things and throw them at them the way I wanted to hurt the miners that brought Papa home, the way I wanted to hurt him for leaving me.

  I felt strangled, dying. I stared at them, quiet now. They didn’t say anything. I left the ferry and went back into the marsh and collapsed. I beat the ground with my fists and my feet. It wasn’t fair. Everybody left me. Everybody ran away and I was just left there, alone.

  * * *

  “Jesus,” Sara said at last, and started to follow Ira.

  “Wait.” Gray touched her gently and his voice sounded more weary and defeated than any voice she had ever heard. “He needs—to be alone, perhaps.” Gray pushed himself to his feet and the tarp partially unraveled. The rents in his skin made her feel queasy. He swayed on his feet. “I am no fit member of your family. All things I have tried to do I have failed. I—”

  “Hush,” she said and tried to steady him. “Let’s go home. Ira will come home eventually.”

  “I do not know what to do,” Gray breathed softly. She could smell him this close, and he smelled rich and strong, like sweat or bread. She helped him to the ocean side of the ferry, and he climbed down as slowly and as carefully as an old man.

  He did not move in the boat until she got him home. He stumbled as he walked next to her onto the dock and into the boat. Jack was there and helped her put him in her bed.

  “Where’s the repair cement?” she asked.

  Gray looked at her as if from a great distance. “In the equipment locker. Next to the diesel starter fluid.”

  Sara found a can with various symbols she could not read hidden behind a can of oil. It belonged in the medicine cabinet, she decided. Enough of this separateness.

  Jack didn’t say a word and the two of them cleaned the tattered tarp and bedclothes out of the wounds and filled them with cement using a putty knife. Gray gave them soft instructions but after a time, his voice fell silent and Sara thought him asleep. She motioned Jack out of the cabin and began to leave herself.

  “Thank you,” said Gray suddenly.

  She turned to him and realized he no longer looked alien to her. Different, yes. But he looked the way she would have expected him to look. Scarred. Tired. He belonged there.

  “It’s a small thing to do for someone who saved my life.” She shrugged and looked out the porthole to the bow. He’d been sleeping there all summer. “We need to build you a real room. There’s not enough room for you.”

  “I do not need much.”

  She smiled at him. “None of us do. But nobody in my family sleeps in the open like an animal.”

  Sara thought she heard a second “thank you” behind her, but she wasn’t sure. It wouldn’t have mattered if she had.

  Jack was looking at her anxiously. “Is he going to be all right?”

  “I don’t know.” Sara looked back toward the cabin. “I hope so.”

  Jack looked at her, then down at the ground, then back at her. “Are you going to send him away?”

  Sara sat at the table in the galley. She lit a cigarette and wished she had a drink. “Do you want me to?”

  Jack shook his head.

  She exhaled smoke. “Okay. How come?”

  “‘Cause,” he stopped, embarrassed. “He deserves to be here.”

  “I agree. I’m not going to send him away.”

  Jack looked relieved. “I was scared you would. On account of me.” His eyes grew wide. “Where’s Ira?”

  “Out. He’ll be back soon.” I hope.

  She could tell from Jack’s face he didn’t believe her. Well, she’d never been able to tell a lie to Mike, either. But, Jack wasn’t his father. Christ. It was stupid to even think that way. Mike’s been gone fourteen years, for God’s sake.

  Sara reached over and gripped him by the shoulder for a minute and he came over to her and they sat there holding each other for some minutes.

  She heard Ira before she saw him. He came in, sullen, a wildness in his eyes. Christ, he looked like Roni. How come she’d never seen it? And he was such a little kid, barely even there.

  “Go on, Jack,” she said softly. “Go on over to Kendall’s. Stay there tonight.”

  Jack looked first at her, then at Ira, then nodded to himself and left.

  The silence lay between Ira and Sara for some minutes.

  “I came by to get my things,” he said.

  “Oh?” She inhaled and tried to think. What could she do? What the hell was going on in that small head?

  “Yeah. I’m leaving. I ain’t got no place here.”

  His eyes were just like Roni’s. Stubborn, too. Just as stubborn as she was when she left.

  She stubbed her cigarette out. “Look. I want you here. You’re my nephew. You’re my blood. I want Gray here. Christ. But I’m not keeping anybody here who doesn’t want to stay.” His expression didn’t change. I guess I wouldn’t be convinced, either, she thought. She tried to be cool. “Your stuff’s in your room. Gray’s in my room, resting. You ought to say goodbye to him.”

  Ira snorted. “I don’t want to. I’m getting out of here.”

  Something snapped in Sara. She grabbed Ira and pushed him down in the chair. “You little shit. What the hell do you think you’re doing? Gray went out there to save your little ass.”

  “Gray killed my dragon. I wanted to get out of here.”

  “That thing was going to have you for lunch! Gray saved me. He saved you. And he was damned near killed doing it. You want to leave? Fine. You do it. You take your things and get the hell out. Somebody saves your life and you don’t give a damn? Fine. You take your ungrateful, snotnosed face out of here. But you will thank him before you leave or I’ll beat you black and blue. You got that? You hear me?”

  He stared at her.

  She sat back in the chair, ashamed. Aren’t things bad enough without you shouting at a little boy? Tact. That’s what you got in spades, Sara. “He’s in there.”

  Ira stood up hesitantly, looked at the door to the cabin, then back at her. He touched the door, looked inside, entered the room.

  She heard faint voices, harsh sounds. Suddenly, she felt as if everything would be all right. That, and a warmth and a strength she’d never felt before. It was like a kind of singing inside of her. She stepped outside and smelled the October sea air. It was brisk.

  Gray and Ira didn’t need her right then.

  She walked down to Sam’s boat and knocked on the railing. After a few minutes, Sam looked out.

  “Hi,” he said warily.

  “Hello, there,” she said cheerfully. “Want to dance?”

  * * *

  “Gray?” I said softly. “Are you here?”

  “In front of you,” he said. I’d never heard him tired before.

  “Are you okay?”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. “No.”

  I turned on the light. His chest was all over covered with that repair gunk, big deep gashes. Oh, God. And he looked so tired and shrunken, like his skin didn’t fit him anymore. “Oh, Gray.”

  He reached out and drew me to his side and I started crying. He held me and I’d never felt so small and helpless, like I was a baby or broken or dead. “I never meant it, Gray. I never meant it. Don’t go away.” And my Mama was there and my Papa and they’d all gone away and if Gray went away too there’d be nobody.

  “Hush,” he said
in a croon. “Hush, Ira. I’m not going anywhere. I love you. Sara loves you. Nobody’s leaving anybody.”

  I thought I heard Mama and Papa near me but I didn’t look for them. I didn’t need to.

  Gray slowly grew warm and soft and he held me. He almost filled the bed and I had to scrunch up against the hull, but I didn’t mind. After a while he looked down at me.

  “What are the three loves?”

  “Love of family, love of work, and love of duty.” I sat up and looked at him right in those big eyes of his. “And always, always, in that order.”

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  Tales from the Venia Woods

  Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. Silverberg has won five Nebula Awards and three Hugo Awards. His novels include Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, and Shadrach in the Furnace. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, and Beyond the Safe Zone. His most recent books are the novels Tom O’Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, At Winter’s End and The New Springtime. For many years he edited the prestigious anthology series New Dimensions, and has recently, along with his wife, Karen Haber, taken over the editing of the Universe anthology series. His story “Multiples” was in our First Annual Collection, “The Affair” was in our Second Annual Collection, “Sailing to Byzantium”—which won a Nebula Award in 1986—was in our Third Annual Collection, “Against Babylon” was in our Fourth Annual Collection, “The Pardoner’s Tale” was in our Fifth Annual Collection, and “House of Bones” was in our Sixth Annual Collection. He lives in Oakland, California.

  Here he takes us to an evocative and vividly drawn Alternate World, one where the Roman Empire never fell, for a deceptively quiet story of childhood dreams, conflicting loyalties, and the futility of good intentions.

  Tales from the Venia Woods

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  This all happened a long time ago, in the early decades of the Second Republic, when I was a boy growing up in Upper Pannonia. Life was very simple then, at least for us. We lived in a forest village on the right bank of the Danubius, my parents, my grandmother, my sister Friya, and I. My father Tyr, for whom I was named, was a blacksmith, my mother Julia taught school in our house, and my grandmother was the priestess at the little Temple of Juno Teutonica nearby.

  It was a very quiet life. The automobile hadn’t yet been invented then—all this was around the year 2650, and we still used horsedrawn carriages or wagons—and we hardly ever left the village. Once a year, on Augustus Day—back then we still celebrated Augustus Day—we would all dress in our finest clothes and my father would get our big iron-bound carriage out of the shed, the one he had built with his own hands, and we’d drive to the great municipium of Venia, a two-hour journey away, to hear the imperial band playing waltzes in the Plaza of Vespasian. Afterward there’d be cakes and whipped cream at the big hotel nearby, and tankards of cherry beer for the grownups, and then we’d begin the long trip home. Today, of course the forest is gone and our little village has been swallowed up by the ever-growing municipium, and it’s a twenty-minute ride by car to the center of the city from where we used to live. But at that time it was a grand excursion, the event of the year for us.

  I know now that Venia is only a minor provincial city, that compared with Londin or Parisi or Roma itself it’s nothing at all. But to me it was the capital of the world. Its splendors stunned me and dazed me. We would climb to the top of the great column of Basileus Andronicus, which the Greeks put up eight hundred years ago to commemorate their victory over Caesar Maximilianus during the Civil War in the days when the Empire was divided, and we’d stare out at the whole city; and my mother, who had grown up in Venia, would point everything out to us, the senate building, the opera house, the aqueduct, the university, the ten bridges, the Temple of Jupiter Teutonicus, the proconsul’s palace, the much greater palace that Trajan VII built for himself during that dizzying period when Venia was essentially the second capital of the Empire, and so forth. For days afterward my dreams would glitter with memories of what I had seen in Venia, and my sister and I would hum waltzes as we whirled along the quiet forest paths.

  There was one exciting year when we made the Venia trip twice. That was 2647, when I was ten years old, and I can remember it so exactly because that was the year when the First Consul died—C. Junius Scaevola, I mean, the Founder of the Second Republic. My father was very agitated when the news of his death came. “It’ll be touch and go now, touch and go, mark my words,” he said over and over. I asked my grandmother what he meant by that, and she said, “Your father’s afraid that they’ll bring back the Empire, now that the old man’s dead.” I didn’t see what was so upsetting about that—it was the same to me, Republic or Empire, Consul or Imperator—but to my father it was a big issue, and when the new First Consul came to Venia later that year, touring the entire vast Imperium province by province for the sake of reassuring everyone that the Republic was stable and intact, my father got out the carriage and we went to attend his Triumph and Processional. So I had a second visit to the capital that year.

  Half a million people, so they say, turned out in downtown Venia to applaud the new First Consul. This was N. Marcellus Turritus, of course. You probably think of him as the fat, bald old man on the coinage of the late 27th century that still shows up in pocket change now and then, but the man I saw that day—I had just a glimpse of him, a fraction of a second as the consular chariot rode past, but the memory still blazes in my mind seventy years later—was lean and virile, with a jutting jaw and fiery eyes and dark, thick curling hair. We threw up our arms in the old Roman salute and at the top of our lungs we shouted out to him, “Hail, Marcellus! Long live the Consul!”

  (We shouted it, by the way, not in Latin but in Germanisch. I was very surprised at that. My father explained afterward that it was by the First Consul’s own orders. He wanted to show his love for the people by encouraging all the regional languages, even at a public celebration like this one. The Gallians had hailed him in Gallian, the Britannians in Britannic, the Japanese in whatever it is they speak there, and as he traveled through the Teutonic provinces he wanted us to yell his praises in Germanisch. I realize that there are some people today, very conservative Republicans, who will tell you that this was a terrible idea, because it has led to the resurgence of all kinds of separatist regional activities in the Imperium. It was the same sort of regionalist fervor, they remind us, that brought about the crumbling of the Empire two hundred years earlier. To men like my father, though, it was a brilliant political stroke, and he cheered the new First Consul with tremendous Germanisch exuberance and vigor. But my father managed to be a staunch regionalist and a stauch Republican at the same time. Bear in mind that over my mother’s fierce objections he had insisted on naming his children for ancient Teutonic gods instead of giving them the standard Roman names that everybody else in Pannonia favored then.)

  Other than going to Venia once a year, or on this one occasion twice, I never went anywhere. I hunted, I fished, I swam, I helped my father in the smithy, I helped my grandmother in the Temple, I studied reading and writing in my mother’s school. Sometimes Friya and I would go wandering in the forest, which in those days was dark and lush and mysterious. And that was how I happened to meet the last of the Caesars.

  * * *

  There was supposed to be a haunted house deep in the woods. Marcus Aurelius Schwarzchild it was who got me interested in it, the tailor’s son, a sly and unlikable boy with a cast in one eye. He said it had been a hunting lodge in the time of the Caesars, and that the bloody ghost of an Emperor who had been killed in a hunting accident could be seen at noontime, the hour of his death, pursuing the ghost of a wolf around and around the building. “I’ve seen it myself,” he s
aid. “The ghost, I mean. He had a laurel wreath on, and everything, and his rifle was polished so it shined like gold.”

  I didn’t believe him. I didn’t think he’d had the courage to go anywhere near the haunted house and certainly not that he’d seen the ghost. Marcus Aurelius Schwarzchild was the sort of boy you wouldn’t believe if he said it was raining, even if you were getting soaked to the skin right as he was saying it. For one thing, I didn’t believe in ghosts, not very much. My father had told me it was foolish to think that the dead still lurked around in the world of the living. For another, I asked my grandmother if there had ever been an Emperor killed in a hunting accident in our forest, and she laughed and said no, not ever: the Imperial Guard would have razed the village to the ground and burned down the woods, if that had ever happened.

  But nobody doubted that the house itself, haunted or not, was really there. Everyone in the village knew that. It was said to be in a certain dark part of the woods where the trees were so old that their branches were tightly woven together. Hardly anyone ever went there. The house was just a ruin, they said, and haunted besides, definitely haunted, so it was best to leave it alone.

  It occurred to me that the place might just actually have been an imperial hunting lodge, and that if it had been abandoned hastily after some unhappy incident and never visited since, it might still have some trinkets of the Caesars in it, little statuettes of the gods, or cameos of the royal family, things like that. My grandmother collected small ancient objects of that sort. Her birthday was coming, and I wanted a nice gift for her. My fellow villagers might be timid about poking around in the haunted house, but why should I be? I didn’t believe in ghosts, after all.

  But on second thought I didn’t particularly want to go there alone. This wasn’t cowardice so much as sheer common sense, which even then I possessed in full measure. The woods were full of exposed roots hidden under fallen leaves; if you tripped on one and hurt your leg, you would lie there a long time before anyone who might help you came by. You were also less likely to lose your way if you had someone else with you who could remember trail marks. And there was some occasional talk of wolves. I figured the probability of my meeting one wasn’t much better than the likelihood of ghosts, but all the same it seemed like a sensible idea to have a companion with me in that part of the forest. So I took my sister along.