The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Monday I became a hero, and the memory still hurt. I remembered the sudden feeling I had as I stood next to the ambassador, that it might be better if I moved just half a step to the left. Then the sudden flare of pain, and the way I spun and flailed as the bullet meant for the alien slammed into my impact vest.

  The ambassador looked down at me, everything seeming to move in slow motion, his face a mask. Then he was buried under a pile of agents as they pushed him to the ground and covered him with their own bodies. The reaction team grabbed the shooter, and interrogation tracked him back to a reactionary group.

  It was a simple solution. A crazy with a gun was something everyone could understand. And nobody got hurt except for me, and the vest protected me so that all I got was a huge bruise on my chest. The whole incident flashed on the news for maybe a day, and then was quickly forgotten. Everything was tied up nice and neat. Too neat.

  Where did he get the gun? Where did he get the ID? How did be get so close?

  What else was going on here?

  The answers were logical and reasonable and too damned easy. Carole and I both suspected something more was involved, but there was no proof. Maybe we were too suspicious, but part of our job was to look for a conspiracy in everything. Now I just didn't have the time.

  "Carole, I've got to bury Sam."

  "Your brothers are there, right? They can bury him. You can pay your respects later," she said. She looked away, shook her head, then looked up at me and her face softened. "Tony, he's not going to know you're not there. Life is for the living, and I'm sure he'd want you to do your work first. I'm sure he'd understand."

  I thought about Sam.

  "First thing you've got to understand is that flatlanders might look like us, might sound like us, might even be related to us, but they don't think like us," Sam said in his cigarette rasp voice. I stood next to him in my footed pajamas, my favorite blanket in one hand, my other hand in his, and remembered how tall he looked as I stared up at him and his whisker-studded face. "Flatlanders measure themselves as individuals, and they use work as the measuring stick. We are different. To us, family is more important than kin. Kin are more important than line. Line is more important than any outsider. And everything is more important than work."

  No, I did not think Sam would understand.

  "Damn it, Carole, I'm the oldest," I said, frustrated. How to explain this to someone from the flats? I tried to make myself calm. "I'm the eldest in the line now. I've got to be there at the funeral."

  She looked up at my stubborn face, and tried another tack.

  "What if our side needs you in the negotiations? Ambassador Foremost says he owes you a favor. What if we need to use that?"

  I remembered Foremost, when he and Carole came to visit me in the examination room after the attack. I remembered his voice, dry as sandpaper and correct as a computer, his head cocked to the side with a nervous manner that always reminded me of the jerky movements of my pet parakeet. The rest of him, however, looked nothing like a bird. He was stockily built, just a few inches taller than Carole, and broad. Underneath the robes and harness I knew he was all muscle and bone, with a protective exoskeleton over his most vulnerable points. He was an omnivore, and the exobiologists claimed he was descended from cursorial hunters, much like early man. He looked more like a wolverine than an ape, but I liked the way he thought.

  And that was part of the problem, when the Trader ship found us. Our races were different enough that communication was difficult, and similar enough that we were potential competitors. Potential for war or peace, trade or conflict. We seemed to be more advanced in some technologies that they wanted, but they never let us forget that they found us, not the other way around. And with a starship in orbit that could reach any place on Earth, they held the high ground.

  Our weapons might be better, but we had no way to get them up and on target. Our boosters were too weak, and the Traders routinely destroyed anything that came near their ship and might even remotely be considered a threat to it.

  The Traders, on the other hand, could drop asteroids on us from space. But asteroid strikes were not going to help them understand our genetic engineering technology. Or get the humans rumor said they wanted to bring on board to join their crew.

  So we exchanged ambassadors, and started to negotiate.

  And negotiate.

  And negotiate.

  "Where you suffer, I suffer," Foremost told me in the hospital. He held my hand and looked closely into my eyes. "In my line, your name is now written."

  Carole looked puzzled, but what the ambassador said made perfect sense to me. It did not make me happy, but I understood it. I wondered what obligations went with his line. I thought briefly of rejecting him, but I did not know how he would react. Safer to say yes.

  Really? a small voice inside me said. Are you sure about this?

  I thought carefully.

  "I accept," I said. "What I have to tell you, though, is that in my line your name is not written."

  He hesitated, then bowed his head.

  "I understand and accept this. Perhaps one day I will earn the right to write my name in your line."

  I relaxed, just a little. One part down. And no threats of war.

  "But I'll make sure you're associated with my line as long as you're here, and my guest," I said.

  He looked up, his eyes as black and hard and dead as a shark's. I tried to read his expression in his face, but he was too unfamiliar, too different.

  "I accept," he said. He stood and left the hospital room.

  I watched him as he left, his robe tight around his body. Now I was part of his line, and he was associated with mine. As long as he was on Earth he could claim protection and assistance from me and mine.

  I hoped to hell he did not understand what I had just done for him. And I hoped I never had to find out what he had done for me.

  That conversation was a week old, and that week seemed like a century ago. A week ago Sam was alive, and I was free to live any way I wanted, without responsibility. Now I had a different set of problems, and Foremost was not in them. Now my problem was Sam, and all the changes that Sam's death made to my life.

  I shook my head to clear it of memories and looked up at Carole.

  "It's not that kind of a favor," I said. "Any personal business Foremost and I have is just that, personal business. Nothing I can say or do will have any effect on the negotiations."

  "But-"

  "No," I said and cut her off. I stood.

  "I'm going to the funeral, Carole. You'll have my resignation letter in an hour."

  I flew into Omaha the next day.

  Rose, with Elizabeth propped on one hip, met me at the airport. When Rose saw me she put Elizabeth down and waved to me. I hurried to them and got a quick hug from Rose and a big, sloppy kiss on the cheek from Elizabeth.

  "Would you like to fly, Elizabeth?" I asked.

  "No," she said firmly. She hid her face in her mother's skirt, then peeked an eye out at me and smiled.

  "Just a little bit?" I coaxed.

  "Oh, Tony," Rose said. "Here?"

  "Here," I said firmly.

  I picked Elizabeth up under her arms and swung her through the air, feet flying wildly, oblivious to the stares of the other passengers, just because I missed her. She laughed and giggled and threw her head back. Rose just smiled and shook her head while Elizabeth's hair swirled and flowed behind her.

  "If you're done now," Rose said, when I put Elizabeth back on the ground. Elizabeth tried to walk in a straight line and instead staggered from side to side, like a drunken sailor, dizzy from her flight. She laughed and laughed until I scooped her up and put her on my shoulders. She grabbed my ears to use as steering handles.

  "I'm ready now," I told Rose.

  I liked Omaba and I liked Steve's house. It was a ranch style, built into the side of a hill so the basement was more like a first floor. He lived in a neighborhood on the far west side of Omaha, out where
new subdivisions sprouted like wildflowers and cornfields fought a losing battle against construction bulldozers.

  Elizabeth took me by the hand and walked me around inside and outside the house to show me her flowers and her toys. Rose walked next to me and worried.

  "I saw you get shot on the news," she said, and everything about her changed with those words. Rose my sister-in-law vanished and suddenly she was Rose the nurse and I was a patient. She subtly moved back a step to look at all of me, then stepped in closer to focus on my chest, where the bullet struck. I wondered how she did the transition so quickly. "Are you all right?"

  "They checked me out at Walter Reed," I reassured her. "I'm fine."

  "And the ambassador?"

  "Not a scratch on him."

  "You're not there with him now, Tony."

  I checked out the tulips that Elizabeth pointed out to me. There were red flowers and white flowers and buds that had not yet opened. "Security is with him all the time," I said. "I was just one more agent."

  Rose walked away from us a few steps. Elizabeth saw a monarch butterfly and raced off to chase it. I saw the butterfly was in no danger, so I went after Rose.

  We stood for a moment in the backyard and looked across the fence toward the fields. Next year they might sprout houses, but this year they still followed older rhythms. Furrows, newly plowed and rich with the stubble left over from last year's harvesting, waited for corn planting. The soil was black and ready, thick with the morning dew and last weekend's rain.

  "Do you think things always get better, Tony?" she asked.

  I did not think she was talking about the cornfield.

  "No," I said, after a moment. "Things don't always get better. They may get better or they may get worse, but it's not an always kind of thing. The only thing that is always is change. Sometimes things change on a regular cycle, like the planting and the growing and the harvesting and the fallowing. Sometimes they change on a bigger cycle, and the smaller cycles change with them or are destroyed. Whether it's good or bad depends on where you stand and what you care about."

  "I don't like change, Tony," she said. "Everything I love is in those smaller cycles, the regular ones. I don't know anything about the bigger cycles except that they might crush what I love."

  "I know," I said awkwardly.

  She turned away from the fields to face me, her arms folded across her chest. She looked down at the ground, then turned her head and looked out across the fields.

  "We got rid of the bombs down here. Things finally looked safe for little girls to grow up. Then the Traders arrive," she said bitterly. "I couldn't stand it if anything happened to her."

  I hugged her, gently. I wanted to tell her everything was going to be all right, but I kept my mouth shut and watched Elizabeth chase butterflies. Finally, Rose reached up and patted my hand.

  "Let's get inside. We've got a long ride tomorrow."

  Rose never went to the north with Steve when he went up to Dakota to fish and hunt and visit Sam. Instead she stayed down south, in Nebraska and Iowa, and worked or visited her folks. This time she had to go north.

  Margaret, Rose's unmarried sister, came to stay with Elizabeth while we were gone. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, she had two mamas. Margaret loved the idea, and Rose was always more relaxed when Margaret was in charge instead of a day care center. We settled Elizabeth with Margaret, said all our good-byes, left all the emergency numbers, and drove north.

  The interstate highway was on the Iowa side of the Missouri. I drove and Rose navigated as we followed the flat ribbon of gray concrete, two lanes wide in each direction, a man-made river of traffic. The river itself was out of sight on our left most of the time, and the loess hills, huge mounds of windblown dirt, rose up like miniature Rocky Mountains on our right. Gradually the hills arched away to the east and out of sight.

  The Missouri curled back into view just as the smell hit us. Rose quickly rolled up the windows as we passed the mountain of manure from the Sioux City stockyards, and the giant billboard that declared: "This golden mountain represents millions to the Siouxland economy-"

  North of downtown we passed over massive housing developments that rolled far to the east and west, like grass over a prairie. Neatly edged lawns and streets laid out in geometrically perfect curves and loops and cul-de-sacs spread out around us like some enormous geometrical poster child.

  We crossed into South Dakota, over the Big Sioux river, and past the computer factories that hugged the Dakota side of the river. The factories were there because the corporate taxes were lower in Dakota, but the schools and the services and everything else were better in Iowa. So the houses and the people lived south of the Sioux, and the work stayed in Dakota.

  Somehow, I was not surprised.

  As we headed north, as the trees got fewer and fewer and smaller and smaller and more twisted and gnarled by the wind, Rose got quieter and quieter. She was an Iowa farm girl at heart, even if she was an expert transplant nurse, and she knew how a farm ought to be run. Nice and tidy. When she saw the fields had no fences, that the animals basically had nothing to stop them from coming across the roads, she had nothing to say.

  The exit off the main road was marked by a stop sign and a small truck stop that had seen better days. It looked lost and forlorn in the icy drizzle and there was no sign of life except for a neon sign that sporadically blinked an advertisement for a cheap, local beer.

  We turned right down a small two-lane blacktop road. I pointed across the brown cattails of a marsh to a copse of trees on the horizon.

  "Summit," I said.

  Summit had a population sign-a small, metal rectangle with the town name and the population-at the turn off the main road. The sign read: 277. Now it was 276. We turned down Main Street, the only paved road in town, turned left at the pool hall, slid down gravel and clay roads for two blocks, then turned left again.

  Sam's house was a tiny white two-story A-frame. The green roof was speckled with black rectangles where shingles had blown free. The exterior was leafed metal siding, smeared with rust marks where the builder used cheap, ungalvanized nails. My brothers were inside. We saw their cars parked outside on the lawn, next to the smoking, burning barrels where they were burning trash from Sam's house. The air was thick and humid with freezing rain and smoke.

  I pushed open the door to Sam's house and we entered through the mudroom. We opened the door to the kitchen and a wave of heat and dust slapped us in the face. We went inside and the dust started us both coughing. My brother Bob sat in a big, overstuffed chair under a window. The curtain was drawn tight across the window. He looked up at us and smiled through his big, black beard as Rose sneezed.

  "Just think of all them skin cells from Sam and Laverne. Thousands and millions and billions of them," Bob said. We coughed and he smiled again. "Wish we could open a window for you, but it's too cold outside."

  In DC, in Nebraska, hell, even in the rest of South Dakota, it was spring. Here, 2000 feet above sea level, on the highest spot between the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers, it was still winter. Outside, we heard a noise: Whirrrrrr "Oh, no," Steve said. He stood next to the kitchen counter with a bottle of beer in his hand. "Not him again."

  Bob grinned. I closed my eyes and prayed. Around me I felt Dakota settle lightly, the first layer, and grasp me firmly.

  Rose stepped next to her husband, a little speck next to a giant. Steve, just as tall as me and even bigger, just shook his head and put on a long-suffering expression. Rose watched all three of us and looked puzzled. Roaaarrrr "Again," Steve said, resignation thick in his voice.

  Bob grinned again, but this time it was strained. I looked around and tried to figure out how I could get out of the house quickly, without my brothers taking vengeance later for leaving them like a coward. There was only one door out, and it was too late. Silence. "What's going on?" Rose asked in a whisper. She looked nervous and pulled a little closer to Steve. I shook any head and Steve squeezed his eyes shu
t, made a face, and opened them again. Bob slumped deeper in his overstuffed chair.

  A perfunctory knock at the door and we heard it swing open and Indian stepped inside. He was medium height, with long, greasy black hair pulled into a tail. His skin was coppery-brown, and his eyes were black and glassy. He wore a green combat jacket, torn and stained with grease, and a pair of jeans. "How ya doin'?"

  "Fine, Indian," Bob said. He gestured vaguely toward the outside, glanced at Rose, and grinned. "Got your town car outside?"

  "Yep, yeah, I do," he said, his voice deep and hoarse, chopped off, as if each syllable came from the edge of an axe. "Not the country car?"

  "No, no, that one I'm still workin' on. Yep, yeah, got that by the house up on some blocks," he said. He laughed, a deep, throaty noise.

  "Ya know, Sam was a good friend of mine, my buddy. He leave me anything in the will?"

  "We don't know," Steve said. He knew. He was executor of the will. But he did not want to talk with Indian. Particularly when Indian was drunk. "You'll have to ask the lawyer."

  "Yep, yeah, Sam was my buddy," he said. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. He carefully straightened it out, but it still flopped down, almost broken through halfway down the white paper. He looked around vaguely, saw me, and looked up.

  "You are one big bastard, aren't you?"

  "Hello, Indian," I said resignedly. He smiled and coughed.

  "Mind if I make some fire, mind if I smoke?" he asked. He ignored us, the question just a formality, and lit up. Bob stopped smiling.

  "We don't have any ashtrays, Indian," he said sharply. Indian waved his hand through the smoke, and waved off Bob's irritation the same way.

  "No problem," be said. He reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a green cotton work glove, stained black and hard with oil and grease. He put it on his left hand and dropped ash into it. "Yep, yeah, Sam was my buddy. He leave me anything in his will?"

  Steve looked irritated. Bob closed his eyes. Rose pulled on my sleeve and I leaned down next to her.

  "He's wearing nail polish on his fingernails. Pink nail polish. And he's got live .22 shells sewn on the outside of his jacket. Why is he doing that?"