The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  "Now he pours it, Now he is pouring the poison, See, there are two brothers, See, now there is one."

  That was when it all blew up like a hot rock in a fire. The bad chief jumped up and ran away from the dance grounds, afraid he had just been witched. Amaledi had a big argument with his mother and told her what he thought of the way she was acting. Then he killed Quolonisi. He said it was an accident but I think he was just tired of listening to the old fool.

  Tsigalili couldn't stand any more. She jumped into a waterfall and killed herself. There was a fine funeral.

  Now Amaledi was determined to kill his uncle. The uncle was just as determined to kill Amaledi, but he was too big a coward to do it himself. So he got Quolonisi's son Panther to call Amaledi out for a fight.

  Panther was a good fighter and he was hot to kill Amaledi, because of his father and his sister. But the chief wasn't taking any chances. He put some poison on Panther's spear. He also had a gourd of water, with poison in it, in case nothing else worked.

  So Amaledi and Panther painted their faces red and took their spears and faced each other, right in front of the chief's house. Amaledi was just as good as Panther, but finally he got nicked on the arm. Before the poison could act, they got into some hand-to-hand wrestling, and the spears got mixed up. Now Panther took a couple of hits. Yes, with the poisoned spear.

  Meanwhile Amaledi's mother got thirsty and went over and took a drink, before anyone could stop her, from the poisoned gourd. Pretty soon she fell down. Amaledi and Panther stopped fighting and rushed over, but she was already dead.

  By now they were both feeling the poison themselves. Panther fell down and died. So did Amaledi, but before he went down he got his uncle with the poisoned spear. So in the end everyone died.

  You do?

  Well, I suppose you had to be there.

  And so 'tis afoots: to-morrow night we are to perform. Thank God Burbage cannot be there to witnesse it: for it were a Question which should come first, that he dye of Laughter, or I of Shame.

  It was a warm and pleasant night. Everyone was there, even Otter. By the time it was dark all the seats were full and many people were standing, or sitting on the ground.

  The platform had only been finished a few days before-with Bigkiller complaining about the waste of timber and labor, that could have gone into strengthening the town's defenses-and it looked very fine. Locust and Blackfox had hung some reed mats on poles to represent the walls of houses, and also to give us a place to wait out of sight before going on. To keep the crowd from getting restless, Spearshaker had asked Dotsuya to have some Bird Clan men sing and dance while we were lighting the torches and making other last preparations.

  Then it was time to begin.

  What? Oh, no, I was not an akta. By now I knew the words to the whole plei, from having translated and repeated them so many times. So I stood behind a reed screen and called out the words, in a voice too low for the crowd to hear, when anyone forgot what came next.

  Spearshaker, yes. He was the ghost. He had put some paint on his face that made it even whiter, and he did something with his voice that made the hair stand up on your neck.

  But in fact everyone did very well, much better than I had expected. The only bad moment came when Amaledi-that was Tsigeyu's son Hummingbird shouted, "Na! Dili, dili!" ("There! A skunk, a skunk!") and slammed his war club into the wall of the "chief's house," forgetting it was really just a reed mat. And Beartrack, who was being Quolonisi, took such a blow to the head that he was out for the rest of the plei. But it didn't matter, since he had no more words to speak, and he made a very good dead man for Amaledi to drag out.

  And the people loved it, all of it. How they laughed and laughed! I never heard so many laugh so hard for so long. At the end, when Amaledi fell dead between his mother and Panther and the platform was covered with corpses, there was so much howling and hooting you would have taken it for a hurricane. I looked out through the mats and saw Tsigeyu and Bigkiller holding on to each other to keep from failing off the bench. Warriors were wiping tears from their eyes and women were clutching themselves between the legs and old Dotsuya was lying on the ground kicking her feet like a baby.

  I turned to Spearshaker, who was standing beside me. "See," I said. "And you were afraid they wouldn't understand it!"

  After that everything got confused for a while. Locust and Blackfox rushed up and dragged Spearshaker away, and the next time I saw him he was down in front of the platform with Tsigeyu embracing him and Bigkiller slapping him on the back. I couldn't see his face, which was hidden by Tsigeyu's very large front.

  By then people were making a fuss over all of us. Even me. A Paint Clan woman, not bad-looking for her age, took me away for some attention. She was limber and had a lot of energy, so it was late by the time I finally got home.

  Spearshaker was there, sitting by the fire. He didn't look up when I came in. His face was so pale I thought at first he was still wearing his ghost paint. I said, "Gusdi nusdi? Is something wrong?"

  "They laughed," he said. He didn't sound happy about it.

  "They laughed," I agreed. "They laughed as they have never laughed before, every one of them. Except for Otter, and no one has ever seen him laugh."

  I sat down beside him. "You did something fine tonight, Spearshaker. You made the People happy. They have a hard life, and you made them laugh."

  He made a snorting sound. "Yes. They laughed to see us making fools of ourselves. Perhaps that is good."

  "No, no." I saw it now. "Is that what you think? That they laughed because we did the plei so badly?"

  I put my hand on his shoulder and turned him to face me. "My friend, no one there tonight ever saw a plei before, except for you. How would they know if it was bad? It was certainly the best plei they ever saw."

  He blinked slowly, like a turtle. I saw his eyes were red.

  "Believe me, Spearshaker," I told him, "they were laughing because it was such a funny story. And that was your doing."

  His expression was very strange indeed. "They thought it comical?"

  "Well, who wouldn't? All those crazy people up there, killing each otherand themselves-and then that part at the end, where everyone gets killed!" I had to stop and laugh, myself, remembering. "I tell you," I said when I had my breath back, "even though I knew the whole thing by memory, I nearly lost control of myself a few times there."

  I got up. "Come, Spearshaker. You need to go to sleep. You have been working too hard."

  But he only put his head down in his hands and made some odd sounds in his throat, and muttered some words I did not know. And so I left him there and went to bed.

  If I live until the mountains fall, I will never understand white men.

  If I hue vntil our Saviour's returne, I shall neuer vnderstande Indians.

  Warre they count as Sport, and bloody Murther an occasion of Mer riment: 'tis because they hold Life itselfe but lightly, and think Death no greate matter neyther: and so that which we call Tragick, they take for Comedie. And though I be damned fort, I cannot sweare that they haue not the Right of it.

  Whatever happened that night, it changed something in Spearshaker. He lived with us for many more years, but never again did he make a plei for us.

  That was sad, for we had all enjoyed the Amaledi story so much, and were hoping for more. And many people tried to get Spearshaker to change his mind-Tsigeyu actually begged him; I think it was the only time in her life she ever begged anyone for anything-but it did no good. He would not even talk about it.

  And at last we realized that his medicine had gone, and we left him in peace. It is a terrible thing for a didahnvwisgi when his power leaves him. Perhaps his ancestors' spirits were somehow offended by our plei. I hope not, since it was my idea.

  That summer Ninekiller's daughter Cricket became Spearshaker's wife. I gave them my house, and moved in with the Paint Clan woman. I visited my friend often, and we talked of many things, but of one thing we never spoke.

&
nbsp; Cricket told me he still made his talking marks, from time to time. If he ever tried to make another plei, though, he never told anyone.

  I believe it was five winters ago-it was not more-when Cricket came in one day and found him dead. It was a strange thing, for he had not been sick, and was still a fairly young man. As far as anyone knew there was nothing wrong with him, except that his hair had fallen out.

  I think his spirit simply decided to go back to his native land.

  Cricket grieved for a long time. She still has not taken another husband. Did you happen to see a small boy with pale skin and brown hair, as you came through our town? That is their son Wili.

  Look what Cricket gave me. This is the turkey feather that was in Spearshaker's hand when she found him that day. And this is the piece of mulberry bark that was lying beside him. I will always wonder what it says.

  We are such stuff as Dreames are made on: and our little Life Is rounded in a sleep.

  NOTES

  1. Elizabethan spelling was fabulously irregular; the same person might spell the same word in various ways on a single page. Shakespeare's own spelling is known only from the Quarto and Folio printings of the plays, and the published poetry; and no one knows how far this may have been altered by the printer. It is not even known how close the published texts are to Shakespeare's original in wording, let alone spelling. All we have in his own hand is his signature, and this indicates that he spelled his own name differently almost every time he wrote it.

  I have followed the spelling of the Folio for the most part, but felt free to use my own judgment and even whim, since that was what the original speller did.

  I have, however, regularized spelling and punctuation to some extent, and modernized spelling and usage in some instances, so that the text would be readable. I assume this book's readership is well-educated, but it seems unrealistic to expect them to be Elizabethan scholars.

  2. Cherokee pronunciation is difficult to render in Roman letters. Even our own syllabary system of writing, invented in the nineteenth century by Sequoyah, does not entirely succeed, as there is no way to indicate the tones and glottal stops. I have followed, more or less, the standard system of transliteration, in which "y" is used for the nasal grunting vowel that has no English equivalent.

  It hardly matters, since we do not know how sixteenth-century Cherokees pronounced the language. The sounds have changed considerably in the century and a half since the forced march to Oklahoma; what they were like four hundred years ago is highly conjectural. So is the location of the various tribes of Virginia and the Carolinas during this period; and, of course, so is their culture. (The Cherokees may not then have been the warlike tribe they later became-though, given the national penchant for names incorporating the verb "to kill," this is unlikely.) The Catawbas were a very old and hated enemy.

  3. Edward Spicer's voyage to America to learn the fate of the Roanoke Colony-or rather his detour to Virginia after a successful privateering operation-did happen, including the bad weather and the loss of a couple of boats, though there is no record that any boat reached the mainland. The disappearance of the Roanoke colonists is a famous event.

  It is only conjecture-though based on considerable evidence, and accepted by many historians-that Powhatan had the colonists murdered, after they had taken sanctuary with a minor coastal tribe. Disney fantasies to the contrary, Powhatan was not a nice man.

  4. I have accepted, for the sake of the story, the view of many scholars that Shakespeare first got the concept of Hamlet in the process of revising Thomas Kyd's earlier play on the same subject. Thus he might well have had the general idea in his head as early as 1591-assuming, as most do, that by this time he was employed with a regular theatrical company-even though the historic Hamlet is generally agreed to have been written considerably later.

  5. As to those who argue that William Shakespeare was not actually the author of Hamlet, but that the plays were written by Francis Bacon or the Earl of Southampton or Elvis Presley, one can only reply: Hah! And again, Hah!

  Echoes

  Alan Brennert

  Alan Brennert was beginning to make a reputation for himself in the genre in the seventies as a writer of finely crafted short stories, but then he was lured away by Hollywood. Since then, he has served as executive story consultant on The Twilight Zone during its recent television revival, has written teleplays for China Beach, The Mississippi, and Darkroom, and has twice been nominated for the Writers Guild Award. He's also published two novels, Kindred Spirits and Time and Chance. In spite of all this, he still finds time for the occasional short story, which show up from time to time in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Pulphouse, and elsewhere. His short fiction has been collected in Her Pilgrim Soul and Other Stories and in MaQui and Other Phantoms, which includes his Nebula Award-winning "Ma 0ui." His story "The Third Sex" appeared in our Seventh Annual Collection.

  In the lyrical and bittersweet story that follows, he shows us that just as sometimes people can't see the forest for the trees, so sometimes you might not be able to hear the music for the echoes ...

  Even now, I can't bring myself to blame my parents. They had their reasons; they carried scars from their own childhoods. My father's father was a manic depressive, his mood swings legendary, the household perpetually caught between the thunder of his passions and the gray spaces of his despair. My father, when he married, longed for a house filled with music and a little girl's laughter; and naturally he wanted to ensure that his daughter didn't inherit her grandfather's affliction. Back in the eighties, when my father was growing up, they hadn't yet mapped the gene that causes bipolar disorder, much less figured out how to mask it; if only it had stopped at that. My mother, for her part, had had an idyllic childhood, perhaps too much so: something of a musical prodigy, she had spent fifteen happy years in violin recitals, only to discover that youthful virtuosity doesn't necessarily mature into adult genius. Having bitterly learned the limits of her own talent, she was determined that her daughter would know no limits.

  And so I was conceived-an appropriate term, I think, since I (and thousands like me) began more as a concept than a person, a set of parameters later realized in flesh. We were an affluent family with a home in Reston, a tiny suburb in northern Virginia, but even for an affluent couple gene enhancement is not a cheap proposition, and I was to have no brothers or sisters. But my parents got their money's worth. By the age of four-as soon as I had the necessary hand strength for the piano-I was picking out complex melodies I'd heard on the radio. I had, have, an eidetic memory, and as soon as I learned to read music, I discovered I could sight-read virtually anything that was put in front of me taking in a page at a glance, then playing it effortlessly. Eighty percent of so called musical genius is just this facility to sight-read, a lucky fluke of memory-, but of course in my case, luck played no part in it.

  The other twenty percent is technique, and I had that as well. By the age of seven I was playing Bach, the piece he'd written for his own daughter, the Anna Magdalena Notebook; by eight, his Two-Part Inventions; by nine, I had mastered the more challenging parts of Bartok's Mikrokosmos. I kept a busy schedule: music lessons twice a week, two hours of practice each day, the occasional student recital, a normal load of schoolwork. But I enjoyed it, I truly did. I loved music; loved making music. Of course it's true that I was quite literally born to love it, shaped not just genetically but by early exposure to music, the "hard wiring" of my sensory cortex that locked in my musical skills; at times I wonder if my passion is less real for that, but the sweet melancholy that grips me as I play the Adagio from Marcello's Concerto in D minor, the serenity I feel when performing Debussy's Image, these are real emotions, regardless of whether genetic conduits were laid to channel them.

  Who knows? Perhaps even the degree of my obsession with music was predetermined, manipulated. That might explain my single-minded attention to it in my earliest years (when I most needed such single-mindedness), forsaking the co
mpany of other children my age; I was almost twelve before I had the first hint of something missing from my life, and by then it was a little late to acquire the social skills others had learned as a matter of course. I had a few acquaintances at school, I was no pariah, but playmates? Not really. Confidants? Hardly. At three o'clock each afternoon, as my classmates scattered to local playgrounds or shopping malls, I was somehow left behind, like a stone in the heart of a leaf storm, too heavy to take flight. I wandered home to practice, or speed-read novels in the woods near Lake Audubon, taking in pages as though I were drawing breaths, with no more real understanding of the life I was reading about than my lungs understood the oxygen they took in.

  On one such afternoon, autumn light waning around me, I lay on my stomach on a fan of oak leaves, reading a book and listening to Rachmaninoff on my laser chip, when I heard a boy's voice behind me say, "Hi."

  Startled, I sat up and turned around. There was a boy, about my age, sitting up against the thick trunk of a maple tree, big floppy sketch pad-orange cover, cream-colored pages-propped up on his knees. Like me, he had fair skin and dark hair, but he was about half a head taller than I. There was something vaguely familiar about him; I wondered if I hadn't seen him in school.

  "Hi," I said. I hadn't heard him approach, and I was sure he hadn't been sitting there when I lay down, ten minutes before. But I was so pleased to be talking to someone-that someone was talking to me-that I didn't give it a further thought.

  But being twelve years "Wow."

  That was enough. He book, showing me other excellent.

  He smiled, a friendly enough smile. "My name's Robert."

  I might have been lonely, but I was still shy; I took a cautious step toward him. "I'm Katherine. Kathy."

  "You live around here?"

  I nodded. "On Howland Drive."