The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “And you to me.”

  “Yet I think we are living some other kind of life. Here, give me your hand. Can you feel mine against yours?”

  “No. I can’t feel anything.”

  “Nor I. Yet I see two hands clasping. Two old men standing on a cloud, clasping hands.” Socrates laughed. “What a great rogue you are, Pizarro!”

  “Yes, of course. But do you know something, Socrates? You are too. A windy old rogue. I like you. There were moments when you were driving me crazy with all your chatter, but you amused me too. Were you really a soldier?”

  “When my city asked me, yes.”

  “For a soldier, you’re damned innocent about the way the world works, I have to say. But I guess I can teach you a thing or two.”

  “Will you?”

  “Gladly,” said Pizarro.

  “I would be in your debt,” Socrates said.

  “Take Atahuallpa,” Pizarro said. “How can I make you understand why I had to kill him? There weren’t even two hundred of us, and twenty-four million of them, and his word was law, and once he was gone they’d have no one to command them. So of course we had to get rid of him if we wanted to conquer them. And so we did, and then they fell.”

  “How simple you make it seem.”

  “Simple is what it was. Listen, old man, he would have died sooner or later anyway, wouldn’t he? This way I made his death useful: to God, to the Church, to Spain. And to Francisco Pizarro. Can you understand that?”

  “I think so,” said Socrates. “But do you think King Atahuallpa did?”

  “Any king would understand such things.”

  “Then he should have killed you the moment you set foot in his land.”

  “Unless God meant us to conquer him, and allowed him to understand that. Yes. Yes, that must have been what happened.”

  “Perhaps he is in this place, too, and we could ask him,” said Socrates.

  Pizarro’s eyes brightened. “Mother of God, yes! A good idea! And if he didn’t understand, why, I’ll try to explain it to him. Maybe you’ll help me. You know how to talk, how to move words around and around. What do you say? Would you help me?”

  “If we meet him, I would like to talk with him,” Socrates said. “I would indeed like to know if he agrees with you on the subject of the usefulness of his being killed by you.”

  Grinning, Pizarro said, “Slippery, you are! But I like you. I like you very much. Come. Let’s go look for Atahuallpa.”

  ROBERT SAMPSON

  Relationships

  Here’s a mysterious and evocative story about the persistence of love …

  Robert Sampson won the Edgar Award for the best mystery story of 1986. His work has appeared in The New Black Mask Quarterly, Espionage Magazine, A Matter of Crime, and elsewhere, and he has published seven books about pulp magazines and pulp series heroes, including The Night Master and Deadly Excitements. In the science fiction genre, his stories have appeared in Planet Stories, Science-Fiction Adventures, Full Spectrum, and elsewhere.

  Relationships

  ROBERT SAMPSON

  A few days after his forty-eighth birthday, Hadley Jackson learned that he could materialize the women from his past. Only think a little at an angle and there they sat, sassy as life, talking as if time were nothing. As if their lives had continued to touch his. The ability to call them upset him considerably. Not fearfully though; he never felt fear.

  To that time, he had been spending ever larger chunks of the evening burrowed in his apartment. He lived with two cats, Gloria and Bill. He had developed the habit of reading aloud to them: selections from news magazines, the poems of Emily Dickinson. The cats were unconcerned by his choices. Reading aloud gave him the feeling that his life still retained both direction and a trace of high white fire.

  One Monday he thought of Mildred Campbell. At one time he had cared a good deal for her. They had never reached what, in the contemporary tongue, was called a relationship. Between them, something essential had been omitted. She didn’t, or couldn’t, return his feelings. Eventually they allowed each other to drift away amid a sort of wan regret.

  All of a sudden, there she sat in a chair by his table. She wore a blue dress of some slinky material and dark hose and dark blue heels. The tip of her left shoe vibrated against the carpet, as it did when she wanted to go home and was about to tell him so.

  He knew at once that she was not real. Apparently she did, too. It did not seem to bother her.

  “This won’t do you any good,” she said. Her voice, quick and pleasant as ever, was tinted with dark impatience. Sooner or later that emotion marred all their meetings.

  “I was just thinking about you.”

  “Well, I’m far away. To tell the truth, I haven’t thought about you for years.”

  “You never did. Not much,” he said.

  She laughed at that, and a cat stuck its head through her left shoulder and looked out at him. It made him feel a little sick, then irritated, since it established so clearly that Mildred was some kind of cloud.

  “Let’s not bother with this,” she said. “I liked you for about ten minutes once. But, Lord God, you can’t stretch ten minutes forever.”

  “I liked you longer than that.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” she said. And was gone. The cat still looked at him. It jumped down and slipped under the table.

  He touched the chair she had sat in and sniffed the air. No trace of her fragrance remained. It occurred to him that if Mildred came, others might follow. So he sat down again and thought of Ruth. He couldn’t angle his thoughts properly; the correct mind set eluded him. Later he wandered slowly around the block, smelling night leaves, wondering if it were possible to leave Creative Chemicals and set up a consulting business.

  The following night, he thought of Ruth again. This time she appeared promptly. She wore a long white formal-looking dress with gold at ears and neck. Her hair was paler blond than he had remembered. She was a little tight; that, too, was familiar. Sprawling back on the davenport, she grinned at him and crossed her ankles.

  “Old friends meet again.” Her lips were bright red. Only something was wrong with her eyes. A whitish film covered them.

  “Twenty-odd years,” he said. “Pretty long between visits. Where you living now?”

  “I’m dead,” she replied. “Years and years ago.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought about you a lot. But I didn’t know where you’d moved to.”

  “That’s the way of it,” she said. “You get separated and the space between just keeps getting bigger. You never knows where a person gets to or what they do when they get there.”

  He was shocked at her eyes and could think of nothing to say. Her voice was low and amused. As she turned her head, gold flashed.

  “Just because I’m dead, there’s nothing wrong with me. I mean, I’m not about to tear out your throat or any dumb thing like that.”

  “What’s it like being dead?”

  “I don’t know. It isn’t anything you can describe. You hear all this foolishness…”

  Her fingers minutely adjusted her skirt. “I guess I better go,” she said. “The damn whiskey’s dying in me.”

  As she rose, he said with sudden regret: “I’m sorry you died.”

  “It was quick. I remember that.”

  After she was gone, he sat silently, thinking. A cat nudged his dangling hand. Her eyes had been very terrible. He realized that he had forgotten to ask where she had lived or how her life had been. Shame leaped in him. Or perhaps guilt. The emotion tasted metallic, gray, the taste of nails.

  She had recognized him, he thought. After all these years.

  He slept in his chair. When he woke, it was still dark outside but the light was on and the cats had crowded between his leg and the chair arm.

  * * *

  The following evening, his daughter, Janet, called from Phoenix. Her voice was enthusiastic, warm, and slipped over certain subjects quickly, as if a question from
him would drop them both through a fragile crust. The combination of effusiveness and reticence annoyed him.

  “I’m fine,” she told him. “Everybody’s fine.”

  “I mean, how are you, really?”

  “Just fine, Dad.” Her voice took on a note of remote querulousness. His ex-wife, Helen, Janet’s mother, another man’s wife, had banged up her car on the way to a class in stained glass. Helen wanted to know, Janet said, if he’d like a suncatcher for his window—a glass cactus or sleeping Mexican. He refused. Helen constantly offered him small gifts through his daughter, never directly talking with him. The effect was of receiving messages relayed from another planet. Perhaps, he thought, it’s Janet trying to keep us in touch. A cat rubbed its neck against his calf.

  “Goodbye,” she said. The telephone droned hollowly against his ear.

  Later he drove slowly across town to the theater at the Mall. Bright clouds streaked the sky like strips of stained glass, rose and green, whitish-gray.

  In the theater, the lights faded down, and an endless succession of commercial messages shouted across the screen. No one in them was older than twenty-five.

  As the sales messages jittered past, Hadley thought suddenly of Rosemary Chalson. Years ago, they had met accidentally at a showing of “South Pacific.” For nearly the entire picture, he agonized whether to take her hand. As he finally decided to reach out, laughter stirred through the audience. Rosemary clapped both hands under her chin and leaned back, laughing, exposing her gums. This he found disagreeable. Before he decided what to do about her hand, the film ended.

  Thinking of her now, and the long tortures of adolescence, he glanced right. Rosemary sat in the next seat, a tub of popcorn in her lap. As ferocious youth bounced across the screen, she lifted a single kernel to her lips.

  He blurted: “It’s been years…”

  He saw the startled white flicker in her eyes. Her body angled infinitesimally from him.

  Immediately he saw that she was not Rosemary. Dull horror ran through him. He blurted: “Excuse me. Excuse me.”

  Rising, he struggled past a succession of knees to the aisle. People stared irritably past him, intent on the yelling screen.

  Outside the theater, he felt the icy crawl of his back. She looked exactly like Rosemary, he thought. The error frightened him. His mind felt full of dangerous potential, like a cocked gun.

  He drove from the Mall, passing beneath apricot lights mounted on high silver poles. The street angled through rows of beige apartments. Nothing moved. The smooth dark sky was unmarred by star or moon. In the hollow street, in the dull light, the apartments seemed images painted on air. Behind them hung featureless nothing, waiting to be shaped.

  Some basic similarity existed, he thought, between the street and his laboratory where, for the past week, the complex process of installing a computer system was underway. Behind ranks of cabinets and boxes dangled a wilderness of black cords. The tips of each glittered silver, waiting for connection.

  In his life, he thought, there had been too much disconnection. Too many dangling cords. Only past connections remained. He seemed hardly linked to the present.

  The woman beside him bent to adjust her seat. When she straightened, he recognized Helen Wycott—Wrycott. He was sharply disturbed. He had not seen her since college. Nor had he thought of her since.

  Now they come without being called, he thought.

  She eyed him disdainfully. “You always acted too good for everybody.”

  “I didn’t feel that way,” he said.

  “That’s not what it looked like.”

  They turned into a dark street with dark houses behind strips of yard. Mailboxes shone dully along the curb. He could think of no reason why she came. Over the years, she had put on much weight, and her remembered features floated within a cruel expanse of cheek.

  He said: “You always were so clever and quick. I never knew what to say to you.”

  “You spent too much time thinking about yourself.”

  “That isn’t true,” he said, trying to remember.

  “It’s true, all right. You do it now.”

  They rode in silence for several blocks. She looked steadily at him, shaking her head.

  “You better give this up,” she told him. “There’s more to life than people you used to know.”

  “Listen,” he said, “I didn’t call you here.”

  “I want off here,” she said.

  He stopped the car. When he opened her door, she was gone. Night air smelled moistly cool and his hands trembled faintly. Aggravation, he thought.

  On going back over their conversation, it struck him that he had, however slightly, won an advantage over her. He drove home briskly, humming to himself and tapping time to himself on the steering wheel. Objectively, of course, he was showing all the signs of dementia. He considered the possible collapse of his mind cheerfully. Perhaps he had now entered a mania phase. How interesting that the symptoms of his detachment from reality expressed themselves as women. That seemed distantly amusing.

  When he opened the door of the apartment, the cats ran toward him uttering sharp cries of greeting. Above their noise he heard the light flutter of feminine voices.

  In the living room, two women smiled at him. One was Ruth, this evening wearing neatly tailored black with pearls. She lulled effusively on the davenport, clearly having had a great deal to drink. The other woman, wearing a ragged blue cardigan and jeans, sat primly in a straight chair, knees together. He did not recognize her.

  Ruth waved breezily at him. “You come sit right down here. We’ve been deciding what to do with you.”

  The other woman said: “I bet you don’t remember me.”

  When she smiled, sweetness suffused her bony face. A former friend of his ex-wife. He recalled the smile. Nothing else.

  “I remember,” he said tentatively.

  “Virginia Cox,” she said. “Virginia Ames now. I have four grandchildren now.”

  “That’s nice,” he said. Ruth tittered. Her fingers floated over his hand, and she leaned toward him.

  “It’s just been ages,” Virginia said. “I thought you were so handsome. Of course, you were married, so I didn’t tell you that.”

  “It’s different now,” Ruth said.

  “Same as it always was,” Virginia said. “Just more open.”

  Ruth slumped back, laughing loudly. “She’s right, Hadley. More open.”

  “I suppose so,” he said, still unable to look at her eyes.

  “We’re shocking him,” Virginia said.

  “That’s a man,” Ruth said. She patted his knee, her bright-tipped fingers vanishing and reappearing in the material of his trousers. “Weren’t you in love with me once, Hadley?”

  He looked from the floor to the amused faces of the women. “I guess once I was.”

  “He guesses,” Ruth purred. “He doesn’t know. He guesses.”

  “Well, the point is, you can’t hang in the past forever,” Virginia said. The quick smile illuminated her face.

  “The past was fun,” Ruth added.

  “But it’s gone now, you know,” Virginia said. “You can’t keep raking it up. So Ruth and I, we’ve decided to help you out.”

  She stood up, not looking at all like a grandmother. “What a pretty cat. What’s his name?”

  “Bill,” he said.

  As he glanced toward the cat, Virginia was gone.

  “Wait a minute,” he cried, turning quickly to Ruth.

  “That’s all we wanted to tell you,” she said.

  Her figure wavered and her arms and body slipped sideways, separating from her shoulders and head. She said, “Don’t think for a minute we weren’t here. Mania, my foot.”

  “I wanted to say…”

  “You’re sweet,” she said. “Can you be home at five tomorrow night?”

  Her figures came to pieces, flowing across the room in translucent strands. It was after ten o’clock. Dropping onto the davenport, he gro
und his face against the flowered cushions.

  * * *

  At five the following evening, the door bell rang once, briefly. As if it had been touched in embarrassment, as a duty, and once was going to be all. When he opened the door, Bill attempted to dart out and had to be captured and held. Facing him in the doorway was a tall, lean-faced woman with heavy dark hair. She smiled tentatively at him and dropped her eyes, which were dark gray. Embarrassment rose in waves from her. In a low voice, she asked:

  “Are you Mr. Jackson? Hadley Jackson?”

  “Yes, m’am.”

  “Did you know Ruth Payne once?”

  “Ruth? Oh, yes.”

  Her lips thinned and she looked so uneasy, he felt a pulse of sympathy.

  “This probably sounds awful funny,” she said, not looking at him. “She wanted me—she kept telling me to see you.”

  “I see,” he said.

  She looked directly at him then and their eyes touched. As she examined him some of the tension left her. She seemed intelligent and wary.

  “You know about Ruth?” she asked.

  “She died.”

  “Yes, she died.”

  He thought that she would say more but she did not.

  After a moment, he said, “Reconnection,” not loudly.

  Faint color touched her face; she looked away.

  He said swiftly before she could recover herself and flee: “I was just going down the street for a cup of coffee. Would you like one?”

  She regarded the air between them as if it were imprinted with complex instructions. “Yes. I think so. That would be nice.”

  “I’ll just get my coat. Come in.”

  Still holding the cat, he stepped aside. Head lifted, smiling faintly, she entered his apartment for the first time.

  JOHN VARLEY

  Just Another Perfect Day

  John Varley appeared on the SF scene in 1975, and by the end of 1976—in what was a meteoric rise to prominence even for a field known for meteoric rises—he was already being recognized as one of the hottest new writers of the seventies. His books include the novels Ophiuchi Hotline, Millenium Titan, Wizard, and Demon, and the collections The Persistence of Vision, The Barbie Murders, and Picnic on Nearside. His most recent book is the collection Blue Champagne. He has won two Nebulas and two Hugos for his short fiction. His extremely popular story “Press Enter ■” was in our Second Annual Collection.