She had found herself staring over his shoulder at the green world outside, trying to hear the birds in the little wood. There would be blackbirds, robins, perhaps a wren. The chorus was sadly depleted. Did he say your views are not welcome in this department? I don't have any "views," protested Anna ... Did he say he will not be renewing your contract? She was thinking of the songthrush and the cuckoo, those sweet and homely voices forever stilled. She had started to cry. He'd given her a paper tissue from a box he kept in his desk drawer, and calmed down, satisfied. "I'm sorry," he'd said. "I'm sorry, but.. ."
The door of the sanitaires creaked and in walked the lost cat. He glanced around, and came to question Anna with a diffident mrrrow? Anna wiped her eyes. Of course, I reacted as stupidly as possible. I was in shock and didn't know it. But she remembered rage at the man's pompous trivialities, rage that came out as tears, and knew that she'd been betrayed by her sex. Loss and shame had turned her into a stereotypical woman. It was still happening now. That's why she was here, grooming herself for comfort, doing the domestic, while Spence went out in public to deal with the world. "I'll be taking to the veil next," she told the cat gloomily. And, indeed, there'd been times in the last few months when she'd have been glad to hide her head, to retire under a big thick blanket and never come out.
"What do I know about animal behavior, anyway?" she said aloud. "I'm a molecular biologist. Enough to impress Spence: that doesn't take much."
The yurt was too hot and the campsite outdoors was too empty. She took Ramone's essays into the utility room, where their washing was still going round, and sat on the cool tiled floor. The Burmese Temple Cat came with her, but couldn't settle. He paced and cried. "Poor thing," Anna sympathized. "Poor thing. They let you down, didn't they? "Rey abandoned you, and you haven't an idea what you did wrong. Never mind, maybe we'll find them."
But his grief disturbed her. It was too close to her own.
Spence and Jake walked through the woods. Spence was wondering what the hell is the approved Academie Frangaise term for "modem," anyhow? For God's sake, even the Vatican accepts "modem." If it's good enough for the Pope ... He'd have to ask Anna. But he wasn't sure there had been any misunderstanding at the post office. It was possible the postmistress really had been telling him, don't hang around. He was still getting very strange vibes from that conversation with the gardienne. Maybe something final and terrible had happened. France and England had declared war on each other, and tourists were liable to be rounded up as undesirable aliens. He wasn't sure that war between two states of the European Union was technically possible. It would have to be a civil war.
No problem with that: a very popular global sport. In fact, he wouldn't be a bit surprised. The only problem would be for the French and English governments to handle anything so organized. Have to get the telecoms to work again first ...
They had reached the dump. That smell surrounded them. Crowds of flies hummed and muttered, and the surface of the wide, garbage-filled hollow drew Spence's eyes. He was looking for something that he had seen last night in the twilight, seen and not quite registered. The flies buzzed. He had stopped walking. Jake was looking up at him, wrinkling his nose: puzzled that an adult could be so indifferent to the ripe stink.
He handed over his laptop. Jake was already carrying the bread.
"Go on back. I'll be along in a minute. I want to check something."
"But I want to see what you find!"
"I'm not going to find anything. I'm just going to take a leak."
"I want a wee too."
"No, you don't. Get going. Tell Anna I won't be long."
Spence waited until he was sure the child wasn't going to turn back. Then he went to investigate the buried wreckage. He found the remains of a caravan. It had been burned out, quite recently, having been stripped first (as far as he could tell) of identification. He crouched on the flank of a big plastic drum that had once contained fertilizer, and pondered. Someone had rolled a wrecked mobile home into this landfill, having removed the plates, and covered it over. What did that prove? It didn't prove anything except that he was letting himself get spooked. "I'm overtired," he said aloud, scowling. "Been on the road too long." But the garbage had shifted when he was clambering over it, and the dump refused to let him cling to his innocence. He climbed down from his perch, and discovered that the suggestive-looking bunch of twigs that he'd spotted really was a human hand.
It had been a woman's hand, not young. It was filthy, and the rats had been at it, but he could still see lumpy knuckles and the paler indentations left by her rings. He found a stick and pried at the surrounding layers of junk until he had uncovered her face. There wasn't much left of that. He squatted, looking down: remembering Father Moynihan in his coffin, like something carved out of yellow wax. His own father too, but he had no memory of that dead body. He'd been too young: not allowed to look.
"What did you do?" he whispered. "Too rich, too funny-looking? Wrong kind of car? Did you support the wrong football team? Was it because you didn't castrate your cat?"
The flies buzzed. Around him, beyond the thin woodland, stretched the great emptiness: all the parched, desolate, rural heartlands of Europe, where life was strained and desperate as in any foundering city. All the lost little towns starved of hope, where people turned into monsters without anything showing on the outside.
Anna groped for potatoes in the sack in the back of the car, brought out another that was too green to eat, and chucked it aside. He knows nothing. He hasn't a clue about the backbiting, the betrayals, all the internal politics. Spence admires my work in a romantic way, but in the end it's just something that keeps me away from home. Maybe he's my wife. She felt the descant of male to female, female to male, the slipping and sliding between identities that had been natural and accepted surely by most people, for years and years. It was Anna's boss who was crazy. How could anyone be angry about an arrangement of chemicals? The sack was nearly empty. What's happening to my French beans? The lettuces will be all shot. She was pining for her garden. It was so difficult to get hold of good fresh vegetables on the road. The prepackaged stuff in the hypermarkets was an insult, but the farmers' markets weren't much better. Not when you were a stranger and didn't know your way around. We'll go home. I'll pull myself together, start fighting my corner the way I should have done at the start. We'll have to go back soon, she assured herself, knowing Spence's silent resistance. Jake has to go to school.
She saw him come out of the wood. He went straight to the sanitaires, vanished for several minutes, and slowly came toward her. He sat on the rim of the hatchback. There were drops of water in his hair, and his hands were wet.
"Where's Jake?"
"In the playground. What's the matter? You look sick."
"I found a body in the dump."
They both stared at the distant figure of the child. He was climbing on the knotted rope, singing a song from a French TV commercial. Anna felt claws of ice dig into her spine, as if something expected but ridiculously forgotten had jumped out Boo! from behind a door.
"You mean a human body?"
"Yes. I could only find one, but I think there must be two." He imagined a couple, a middle-aged early-retirement couple, modestly well-heeled, children, if any, long ago departed. Spending the summer en plein air, the way the French love to do: with their cat. "I covered it over again. I was afraid to root around, but there's a caravan too. I'm not joking. It's true."
"You'd better show me."
Spence gasped, and shook his head. "I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because we can't let Jake see that, and we can't leave him here alone."
Anna nodded. She went to the front of the car and started searching under the seats and in the door pockets.
"What are you looking for?"
"The camera." She brought it out. "I'll take pictures. Will it be easy for me to find?"
It was about the same time of day as it had been when they arrived. Shortl
y, Jake noticed that his father had returned and came running over. The Balinese Dancer ran along beside him.
"Where's Mummy?"
"She's gone to check something."
Jake's eyes narrowed. "Her too?" Spence had forgotten he'd used the exact same words at the dump, when he sent the kid on alone. "Is it something about my cat?"
Balinese Dancer looked up. Spence had a terrible, irrational feeling that the cat knew. He knew what Spence had seen, and that there was no hope anymore.
"Don't start getting ideas."
For most of the time that Anna was away, it didn't cross his mind that she was in danger. Then it did, and he spent a very unhappy quarter of an hour, playing Scrabble with Jake while racking his brains to recover every word he'd spoken in that town, especially in his rash interview with the gardienne: praying to God he'd said nothing to rouse anyone's suspicions. They washed the pota toes. Spence cut them up, chopped an onion and some garlic, opened a can of tomatoes and one of chickpeas. He put olives in a bowl, and spread the picnic table-cloth. He didn't light the stove until everything was ready, because they were running out of gas. At last, Anna came out of that grisly wood.
"Shall I start cooking?"
"I'm going to have a shower," she said.
While Anna put Jake to bed, Spence washed the dishes, and stored away the almost untouched potato stew. He checked the car over and gathered a few stray belongings from the shriveled grass. Their camp was compact. One modest green hatchback, UK plates, anonymous middle-class brand. One mushroom-shaped tent dwelling. No bicycles, no surfboards. No TV aerial dish, no patio furniture.
The sky was overcast, but blurred with moon silver in the east. How often had they camped like this beside some still and secret little town? That place in Italy on the hilltop, most certainly a haunt of vampires ... The cat wove at his ankles and followed him indoors. Inside, the yurt was a single conical space that could be divided by cunning foldaway partitions. It was furnished with nomad simplicity and comfort: their bed, rugs, books; small useful items of gear. There was no mere decoration, no more than if they'd been traveling on the steppes with Genghis Khan. Spence set down the wine bottle, two glasses, and the rest of the bread. Anna stepped out of Jake's section and sealed it behind her. They sat on the floor with the lamp turned low, and looked at the pictures she had taken. She'd uncovered the body further and taken several shots of the head and torso, the hands and wrists; and then the whole ensemble, the wrecked caravan. She had seen what she thought was the second corpse, burned to a black crisp inside the caravan, but hadn't been able to get a clear b* picture of that.
"You think it was locals?" she asked.
Spence told her about the postmistress, and the gardienne. A one-street town wrapped in guilty silence: "I'm sure they know about it. Maybe someone had an accident. Someone ran into them and wrecked them, found they were dead and got scared .. ."
"And took the woman's rings. And gouged out her eyes. And tied her up."
Anna touched the preview screen, advancing from shot to shot until she found the woman's face. She moved it into close-up, but their camera was not equal to this kind of work. The image blurred into a drab Halloween mask: crumpled plastic; black eye holes.
"That other couple must have picked up on something," she guessed. "That's why they left so quickly." She shivered.
"Well," said Spence, "it's been all around us. We finally managed to run right into it. The town that eats tourists. Of course, in the good old U.S. of A., we're cool about this kind of thing. Vampire towns, ghoul towns, whole counties run by serial-killer aliens. We take it for granted. Poor Balinese Dancer, I'm afraid your people definitely aren't coming back."
"You can't call him that," she said. "He's not a Balinese. He's a Birman. Don't you believe me? Hook up the CD-ROM, and we can look him up in Jake's encyclopedia-"
"I believe you. But why can't I call him Balinese?"
"Because you're doing it to annoy me. And ... we don't need that."
In the direct look she gave him, the hostilities that had rumbled under their unnegotiated peace finally came to an end. Spence sighed. "Oh, okay. I won't."
"Is there any wine left?" asked Anna. He handed her the bottle. She poured some into their glasses, broke a chunk of bread, and ate it. "So what are we going to do? Report our finds to the gendarmes?"
"Don't be stupid," said Anna. "Not here, definitely not. But in Lyons, maybe."
"They wouldn't do anything. You know they wouldn't. City tics don't come looking for trouble in the deserte rural."
The rural desert. That was what the French called their prairie band. Mile upon mile of wheat and maize and sunflowers: all of it on death row as an economic activity, having lived just long enough to kill off most of the previous ecology. And destroy a lot of human lives.
"Okay, then we could stick around here and do a little investigation for ourselves."
The cat was sitting diffidently outside the circle of lamplight, his eyes moving from face to face. Spence's heart went out to him. "Try to find out who the cat's folks were, where they came from, why this happened to them. Uncover some fetid tale or other, maybe get one or other of ourselves tortured and killed as well; or maybe Jake-" Anna grimaced wryly. "No thanks."
"Or we could do what they never do in the movies. Stop the thrilling plot before it starts. Walk on by."
She switched off the camera and stayed for a long time staring at the grey floor of the yurt, elbows on her knees and chin in her hands. She had turned the dead face from side to side, without flinching from her task. This is the truth. It must be examined, described. But no one wanted to be told. There would be no assessment, no judgment.
"Spence, I have a terrible feeling. It's about my paper. I started thinking this when I was looking at her, when I was recording her death. Suppose ... suppose the tabloids aren't loopy and my boss isn't deranged? Suppose while we've been away, while we've been cut off from all the news, the world has finally been going over the edge, because of what I said?"
"The whole place was going mad before you published, kid. The end of the world as we know it started a long time ago."
"Yes, Spence dear. Exactly. That's what my paper says."
Spence took a slug from the wine bottle, neglecting the glass that was poured for him. That sweet tone of invincible intellectual superiority, when it was friendly, always made him go weak at the knees.
"Would you like to have sex?" he hazarded, across the tremulous lamplight.
"Like plague victims," said Anna huskily. "Rutting in the streets, death all around."
"Okay, but would you?"
Flash of white knickers in the twilight. Nothing's sure. Every time could be the last.
"Yes."
When they were both done, both satisfied, Spence managed to fall asleep. He dreamed that he was clinging to the side of a runaway train that was racing downhill in the dark. Anna was in his arms and Jake held between them. He knew that he had to leap from this train before it smashed, holding onto them both. But he was too terrified to let go.
They had pitched the yurt at dusk, in a service area campsite. The great road thundered by the scrubby expanse of red grit, where tents and trucks and vans stood cheek-by-jowl without a tree or a blade of grass in sight. The clientele was mixed. There were gens de voyage, with their pitches staked out in the traditional, aggressive washing lines; colorful New Age travelers trying to look like visitors from the stone age; respectable itinerant workers in their tidy camper vans; truck drivers asleep in their cabs. Among them were the tourists, people like Anna and Jake and Spence, turned back from the channel ports by the fishing-dispute blockade, who had wisely moved inland from the beaches.
Spence was removing the cassette player from the car, so he could refit the wide bandwidth receiver that would give them access to the great big world again. The dusk was no problem, as this campsite was lit by enormous gangling floodlights that seemed to have been bought secondhand from a football stadium. But the
player had turned obstinate. He was lying on his back, legs in the yard and face squished in the leg space under the dashboard, struggling with some tiny recalcitrant screws. Chuck the cat, ever fascinated and helpful when there was work going on, was sitting on the passenger seat and patting the screws that had come out down into the crack at the back of the cushion.
Something thumped near Spence's head. He wriggled out. Anna had returned from her mission with a lumpy burlap sack.
"What's in there?"
"Potatoes, courgettes-I-mean-zucchini, and string beans. But the beans are pure string."
"Still, that's pretty good. What did you have to do?"
The channel tunnel had been down, so to speak, for most of the summer. This new interruption of the ferry services had compounded everyone's problems. Hypermarches along the coast had turned traitor, closing their doors to all but the local population. The more enterprising of the stranded travelers were resorting to barter.
"Nothing too difficult. First aid. Dietary advice to an incipient diabetic, she needs an implant but diet will help; and I'm attending to a septic cut."
"This is weird. You can't practice medicine!"
Anna rubbed her bare brown shoulder, where the sack had galled her, and shrugged. "Let me see. First, do no harin. Well, I have no antibiotics, no antimalarials, no carrier viruses or steroids, so that's all right. I have aspirin, I know bow to reduce a fracture, and I wash my hands a lot. what more can you ask?"
"My God." He groped for the screwdriver, which had escaped into campingtrip morass under the seat. "Could you give me some assistance for a moment? Since you're here?"
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection Page 55
