The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF

by Gardner Dozois

  I cut a little firewood and stacked it to one side, just to be neighborly.

  Maybe the bears were watching us from the bushes even then. There’s no way to know. I tasted one of the newberries and spit it out. It was so sweet it was sour, just the sort of thing you would imagine a bear would like.

  That evening after supper, I asked Wallace Jr. if he might want to go with me to visit Mother. I wasn’t surprised when he said “yes.” Kids have more consideration than folks give them credit for. We found her sitting on the concrete front porch of the Home, watching the cars go by on I-65. The nurse said she had been agitated all day. I wasn’t surprised by that, either. Every fall as the leaves change, she gets restless, maybe the word is hopeful, again. I brought her into the dayroom and combed her long white hair. “Nothing but bears on TV anymore,” the nurse complained, flipping the channels. Wallace Jr. picked up the remote after the nurse left, and we watched a CBS or NBC Special Report about some hunters in Virginia who had gotten their houses torched. The TV interviewed a hunter and his wife whose $117,500 Shenandoah Valley home had burned. She blamed the bears. He didn’t blame the bears, but he was suing for compensation from the state since he had a valid hunting license. The state hunting commissioner came on and said that possession of a hunting license didn’t prohibit (enjoin, I think, was the word he used) the hunted from striking back. I thought that was a pretty liberal view for a state commissioner. Of course, he had a vested interest in not paying off. I’m not a hunter myself.

  “Don’t bother coming on Sunday,” Mother told Wallace Jr. with a wink. “I’ve drove a million miles and I’ve got one hand on the gate.” I’m used to her saying stuff like that, especially in the fall, but I was afraid it would upset the boy. In fact, he looked worried after we left and I asked him what was wrong.

  “How could she have drove a million miles?” he asked. She had told him 48 miles a day for 39 years, and he had worked it out on his calculator to be 336,960 miles.

  “Have driven,” I said. “And it’s forty-eight in the morning and forty-eight in the afternoon. Plus there were the football trips. Plus, old folks exaggerate a little.” Mother was the first woman school bus driver in the state. She did it every day and raised a family, too. Dad just farmed.

  I usually get off the interstate at Smiths Grove, but that night I drove north all the way to Horse Cave and doubled back so Wallace Jr. and I could see the bears’ fires. There were not as many as you would think from the TV – one every six or seven miles, hidden back in a clump of trees or under a rocky ledge. Probably they look for water as well as wood. Wallace Jr. wanted to stop, but it’s against the law to stop on the interstate and I was afraid the state police would run us off.

  There was a card from Wallace in the mailbox. He and Elizabeth were doing fine and having a wonderful time. Not a word about Wallace Jr., but the boy didn’t seem to mind. Like most kids his age, he doesn’t really enjoy going places with his parents.

  On Saturday afternoon, the Home called my office (Burley Belt Drought &Hail) and left word that Mother was gone. I was on the road. I work Saturdays. It’s the only day a lot of part-time farmers are home. My heart literally skipped a beat when I called in and got the message, but only a beat. I had long been prepared. “It’s a blessing,” I said when I got the nurse on the phone.

  “You don’t understand,” the nurse said. “Not passed away, gone. Ran away, gone. Your mother has escaped.” Mother had gone through the door at the end of the corridor when no one was looking, wedging the door with her comb and taking a bedspread which belonged to the Home. What about her tobacco? I asked. It was gone. That was a sure sign she was planning to stay away. I was in Franklin, and it took me less than an hour to get to the Home on I-65. The nurse told me that Mother had been acting more and more confused lately. Of course they are going to say that. We looked around the grounds, which is only an acre with no trees between the interstate and a soybean field. Then they had me leave a message at the sheriff’s office. I would have to keep paying for her care until she was officially listed as Missing, which would be Monday.

  It was dark by the time I got back to the house, and Wallace Jr. was fixing supper. This just involves opening a few cans, already selected and grouped together with a rubber band. I told him his grandmother had gone, and he nodded, saying, “She told us she would be.” I called Florida and left a message. There was nothing more to be done. I sat down and tried to watch TV, but there was nothing on. Then, I looked out the back door, and saw the firelight twinkling through the trees across the northbound lane of I-65, and realized I just might know where she had gone to find her.

  It was definitely getting colder, so I got my jacket. I told the boy to wait by the phone in case the sheriff called, but when I looked back, halfway across the field, there he was behind me. He didn’t have a jacket. I let him catch up. He was carrying his .22, and I made him leave it leaning against our fence. It was harder climbing the government fence in the dark, at my age, than it had been in the daylight. I am sixty-one. The highway was busy with cars heading south and trucks heading north.

  Crossing the shoulder, I got my pants cuffs wet on the long grass, already wet with dew. It is actually bluegrass.

  The first few feet into the trees it was pitch black and the boy grabbed my hand. Then it got lighter. At first I thought it was the moon, but it was the high beams shining like moonlight into the tree-tops, allowing Wallace Jr. and me to pick our way through the brush. We soon found the path and its familiar bear smell.

  I was wary of approaching the bears at night. If we stayed on the path we might run into one in the dark, but if we went through the bushes we might be seen as intruders. I wondered if maybe we shouldn’t have brought the gun.

  We stayed on the path. The light seemed to drip down from the canopy of the woods like rain. The going was easy, especially if we didn’t try to look at the path but let our feet find their own way.

  Then through the trees I saw their fire.

  The fire was mostly of sycamore and beech branches, the kind of fire that puts out very little heat or light and lots of smoke. The bears hadn’t learned the ins and outs of wood yet. They did okay at tending it, though. A large cinnamon brown northern-looking bear was poking the fire with a stick, adding a branch now and then from a pile at his side. The others sat around in a loose circle on the logs. Most were smaller black or honey bears, one was a mother with cubs. Some were eating berries from a hubcap. Not eating, but just watching the fire, my mother sat among them with the bedspread from the Home around her shoulders.

  If the bears noticed us, they didn’t let on. Mother patted a spot right next to her on the log and I sat down. A bear moved over to let Wallace Jr. sit on her other side.

  The bear smell is rank but not unpleasant, once you get used to it. It’s not like a barn smell, but wilder. I leaned over to whisper something to Mother and she shook her head. It would be rude to whisper around these creatures that don’t possess the power of speech, she let me know without speaking. Wallace Jr. was silent too. Mother shared the bedspread with us and we sat for what seemed hours, looking into the fire.

  The big bear tended the fire, breaking up the dry branches by holding one end and stepping on them, like people do. He was good at keeping it going at the same level. Another bear poked the fire from time to time, but the others left it alone. It looked like only a few of the bears knew how to use fire, and were carrying the others along. But isn’t that how it is with everything? Every once in a while, a smaller bear walked into the circle of firelight with an armload of wood and dropped it onto the pile. Median wood has a silvery cast, like driftwood.

  Wallace Jr. isn’t fidgety like a lot of kids. I found it pleasant to sit and stare into the fire. I took a little piece of Mother’s Red Man, though I don’t generally chew. It was no different from visiting her at the Home, only more interesting, because of the bears. There were about eight or ten of them. Inside the fire itself, things weren’t so dull, ei
ther: little dramas were being played out as fiery chambers were created and then destroyed in a crashing of sparks. My imagination ran wild. I looked around the circle at the bears and wondered what they saw. Some had their eyes closed. Though they were gathered together, their spirits still seemed solitary, as if each bear was sitting alone in front of its own fire.

  The hubcap came around and we all took some newberries. I don’t know about Mother, but I just pretended to eat mine. Wallace Jr. made a face and spit his out. When he went to sleep, I wrapped the bedspread around all three of us. It was getting colder and we were not provided, like the bears, with fur. I was ready to go home, but not Mother. She pointed up toward the canopy of trees, where a light was spreading, and then pointed to herself. Did she think it was angels approaching from on high? It was only the high beams of some southbound truck, but she seemed mighty pleased. Holding her hand, I felt it grow colder and colder in mine.

  Wallace Jr. woke me up by tapping on my knee. It was past dawn, and his grandmother had died sitting on the log between us. The fire was banked up and the bears were gone and someone was crashing straight through the woods, ignoring the path. It was Wallace. Two state troopers were right behind him. He was wearing a white shift, and I realized it was Sunday morning. Underneath his sadness on learning of Mother’s death, he looked peeved.

  The troopers were sniffing the air and nodding. The bear smell was still strong. Wallace and I wrapped Mother in the bedspread and started with her body back out to the highway. The troopers stayed behind and scattered the bears’ fire ashes and flung their firewood away into the bushes. It seemed a petty thing to do. They were like bears themselves, each one solitary in his own uniform.

  There was Wallace’s Olds 98 on the median, with its radial tires looking squashed on the grass. In front of it there was a police car with a trooper standing beside it, and behind it a funeral home hearse, also an Olds 98.

  “First report we’ve had of them bothering old folks,” the trooper said to Wallace. “That’s not hardly what happened at all,” I said, but nobody asked me to explain. They have their own procedures. Two men in suits got out of the hearse and opened the rear door. That to me was the point at which Mother departed this life. After we put her in, I put my arms around the boy. He was shivering even though it wasn’t that cold. Sometimes death will do that, especially at dawn, with the police around and the grass wet, even when it comes as a friend.

  We stood for a minute watching the cars pass. “It’s a blessing,” Wallace said. It’s surprising how much traffic there is at 6:22 a.m.

  That afternoon, I went back to the median and cut a little firewood to replace what the troopers had flung away. I could see the fire through the trees that night.

  I went back two nights later, after the funeral. The fire was going and it was the same bunch of bears, as far as I could tell. I sat around with them a while but it seemed to make them nervous, so I went home. I had taken a handful of newberries from the hubcap, and on Sunday I went with the boy and arranged them on Mother’s grave. I tried again, but it’s no use, you can’t eat them.

  Unless you’re a bear.

  EVEN THE QUEEN

  Connie Willis

  Connie Willis lives with her husband in Greeley, Colorado. She first attracted attention as a writer in the late ’70s with a number of stories for the now-defunct magazine Galileo, and went on to establish herself as one of the most popular and critically acclaimed writers of the 1980s. In 1982, she won two Nebula Awards, one for her novelette “Fire Watch,” and one for her short story “A Letter from the Clearys”; a few months later, “Fire Watch” went on to win her a Hugo Award as well. In 1989, her novella “The Last of the Winnebagoes” won both the Nebula and the Hugo, and she won another Nebula in 1990 for her novelette “At The Rialto.” In 1993, her landmark novel Doomsday Book won both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award, as did her short story “Even the Queen.” She won another Hugo in 1994 for her story “Death on the Nile,” another in 1997 for her story “The Soul Selects Her Own Society,” another in 1999 for her novel To Say Nothing of the Dog, and yet another in 2000 for her novella “The Winds of Marble Arch” – all of which makes her one of the most honoured writers in the history of science fiction, and, as far as I know, the only person ever to win two Nebulas and two Hugos in the same year. Her other books include the novels Water Witch, Light Raid, and Promised Land, all written in collaboration with Cynthia Felice, Lincoln’s Dreams, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Bellwether, Uncharted Territory, and Remake, and, as editor, the anthologies The New Hugo Winners, Volume III, Nebula Awards 33, and (with Sheila Williams) A Woman’s Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women. Her short fiction has been gathered in three collections, Fire Watch, Impossible Dreams, and Miracle and Other Christmas Stories. Her most recent book is the novel, Passage. She has had stories in our First and Third through Eighth annual collections.

  Here, in one of her best-known stories, she provides a wry and controversial examination of a technological change so sweeping and fundamental that it affects every woman on Earth. . . .

  THE PHONE SANG as I was looking over the defense’s motion to dismiss. “It’s the universal ring,” my law clerk Bysshe said, reaching for it. “It’s probably the defendant. They don’t let' you use signatures from jail.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s my mother.”

  “Oh.” Bysshe reached for the receiver. “Why isn’t she using her signature?”

  “Because she knows I don’t want to talk to her. She must have found out what Perdita’s done.”

  “Your daughter Perdita?” he asked, holding the receiver against his chest. “The one with the little girl?”

  “No, that’s Viola. Perdita’s my younger daughter. The one with no sense.”

  “What’s she done?”

  “She’s joined the Cyclists.”

  Bysshe looked inquiringly blank, but I was not in the mood to enlighten him. Or in the mood to talk to Mother. “I know exactly what Mother will say. She’ll ask me why I didn’t tell her, and then she’ll demand to know what I’m going to do about it, and there is nothing I can do about it, or I obviously would have done it already.”

  Bysshe looked bewildered. “Do you want me to tell her you’re in court?”

  “No.” I reached for the receiver. “I’ll have to talk to her sooner or later.” I took it from him. “Hello, Mother,” I said.

  “Traci,” Mother said dramatically, “Perdita has become a Cyclist.”

  “I know.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I thought Perdita should tell you herself.”

  “Perdita!” She snorted. “She wouldn’t tell me. She knows what I’d have to say about it. I suppose you told Karen.”

  “Karen’s not here. She’s in Iraq.” The only good thing about this whole debacle was that thanks to Iraq’s eagerness to show it was a responsible world-community member and its previous penchant for self-destruction, my mother-in-law was in the one place on the planet where the phone service was bad enough that I could claim I’d tried to call her but couldn’t get through, and she’d have to believe me.

  The Liberation has freed us from all sorts of indignities and scourges, including Iraq’s Saddams, but mothers-in-law aren’t one of them, and I was almost happy with Perdita for her excellent timing. When I didn’t want to kill her.

  “What’s Karen doing in Iraq?” Mother asked.

  “Negotiating a Palestinian homeland.”

  “And meanwhile her granddaughter is ruining her life,” she said irrelevantly. “Did you tell Viola?”

  “I told you, Mother. I thought Perdita should tell all of you herself.”

  “Well, she didn’t. And this morning one of my patients, Carol Chen, called me and demanded to know what I was keeping from her. I had no idea what she was talking about.”

  “How did Carol Chen find out?”

  “From her daughter, who almost joined the Cyclists last year.
Her family talked her out of it,” she said accusingly. “Carol was convinced the medical community had discovered some terrible side effect of ammenerol and were covering it up. I cannot believe you didn’t tell me, Traci.”

  And I cannot believe I didn’t have Bysshe tell her I was in court, I thought. “I told you, Mother. I thought it was Perdita’s place to tell you. After all, it’s her decision.”

  “Oh, Traci!” Mother said. “You cannot mean that!”

  In the first fine flush of freedom after the Liberation, I had entertained hopes that it would change everything – that it would somehow do away with inequality and matriarchal dominance and those humorless women determined to eliminate the word “manhole” and third-person singular pronouns from the language.