Modern Classics of Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  When the lights returned we sat there and smoked. She had told me of her husband, who had died a hero’s death in time to save him from the delirium tremors which would have ended his days. Died as the bravest die – not knowing why – because of a reflex, which after all had been a part of him, a reflex which had made him cast himself into the path of a pack of wolf-like creatures attacking the exploring party he was with – off in that forest at the foot of Saint Stephen’s – to fight them with a machete and to be torn apart by them while his companions fled to the camp, where they made a stand and saved themselves. Such is the essence of valor: an unthinking moment, a spark along the spinal nerves, predetermined by the sum total of everything you have ever done, wished to do or not to do, and wish you had done, or hadn’t, and then comes the pain.

  We watched the gallery on the wall. Man is the reasoning animal? Greater than beasts but less than angels? Not the murderer I shot that night. He wasn’t even the one who uses tools or buries his dead. Laughs, aspires, affirms? I didn’t see any of those going on. Watches himself watch himself doing what he knows is absurd? Too sophisticated. He just did the absurd without watching. Like running back into a burning house after his favorite pipe and a can of tobacco. Devises religions? I saw people praying, but they weren’t devising. They were making last-ditch efforts at saving themselves, after they’d exhausted everything else they knew to do. Reflex.

  The creature who loves?

  That’s the only one I might not be able to gainsay.

  I saw a mother holding her daughter up on her shoulders while the water swirled about her armpits, and the little girl was holding her doll up above her shoulders, in the same way. But isn’t that – the love – a part of the total? Of everything you have ever done, or wished? Positive or neg? I know that it is what made me leave my post, running, and what made me climb into Eleanor’s flyer and what made me fight my way through the storm and out to that particular scene.

  I didn’t get there in time.

  I shall never forget how glad I was that someone else did. Johnny Keams blinked his lights above me as he rose, and he radioed down:

  “It’s all right. They’re okay. Even the doll.”

  “Good,” I said, and headed back.

  As I set the ship down on its balcony landing, one figure came toward me. As I stepped down a gun appeared in Chuck’s hand.

  “I wouldn’t kill you, Juss,” he began, “but I’d wound you. Face that wall. I’m taking the flyer.”

  “Are you crazy?” I asked him.

  “I know what I’m doing. I need it, Juss.”

  “Well, if you need it, there it is. You don’t have to point a gun at me. I just got through needing it myself. Take it.”

  “Lottie and I both need it,” he said. “Turn around!”

  I turned toward the wall.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “We’re going away, together – now!”

  “You are crazy,” I said. “This is no time…”

  “C’mon, Lottie,” he called, and there was a rush of feet behind me and I heard the flyer’s door open.

  “Chuck!” I said. “We need you now! You can settle this thing peacefully, in a week, in a month, after some order has been restored. There are such things as divorces, you know.”

  “That won’t get me off this world, Juss.”

  “So how is this going to?”

  I turned, and I saw that he had picked up a large canvas bag from somewhere and had slung it over his left shoulder, like Santa Claus.

  “Turn back around! I don’t want to shoot you,” he warned.

  The suspicion came, grew stronger.

  “Chuck, have you been looting?” I asked him.

  “Turn around!”

  “All right, I’ll turn around. How far do you think you’ll get?”

  “Far enough,” he said: “Far enough so that no one will find us – and when the time comes, we’ll leave this world.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think you will, because I know you.”

  “We’ll see.” His voice was further away then.

  I heard three rapid footsteps and the slamming of a door. I turned then, in time to see the flyer rising from the balcony.

  I watched it go. I never saw either of them again.

  Inside, two men were unconscious on the floor. It turned out that they were not seriously hurt. After I saw them cared for, I rejoined Eleanor in the Tower.

  All that night did we wait, emptied, for morning.

  Somehow, it came.

  We sat and watched the light flow through the rain. So much had happened so quickly. So many things had occurred during the past week that we were unprepared for morning.

  It brought an end to the rains.

  A good wind came from out of the north and fought with the clouds, like En-ki with the serpent Tiamat. Suddenly, there was a canyon of cobalt.

  A cloudquake shook the heavens and chasms of light opened across its dark landscape.

  It was coming apart as we watched.

  I heard a cheer, and I croaked in unison with it as the sun appeared.

  The good, warm, drying, beneficent sun drew the highest peak of Saint Stephen’s to its face and kissed both its cheeks.

  There was a crowd before each window. I joined one and stared, perhaps for ten minutes.

  * * *

  When you awaken from a nightmare you do not normally find its ruins lying about your bedroom. This is one way of telling whether or not something was only a bad dream, or whether or not you are really awake.

  We walked the streets in great boots. Mud was everywhere. It was in basements and in machinery and in sewers and in living room clothes closets. It was on buildings and on cars and on people and on the branches of trees. It was broken brown blisters drying and waiting to be peeled off from clean tissue. Swarms of skytoads rose into the air when we approached, hovered like dragonflies, returned to spoiling food stores after we had passed. Insects were having a heyday, too. Betty would have to be deloused. So many things were overturned or fallen down, and half-buried in the brown Sargassos of the streets. The dead had not yet been numbered. The water still ran by, but sluggish and foul. A stench was beginning to rise across the city. There were smashed-in store fronts and there was glass everywhere, and bridges fallen down and holes in the streets.… But why go on? If you don’t get the picture by now, you never will. It was the big morning after, following a drunken party by the gods. It is the lot of mortal man always to clean up their leavings or to be buried beneath them.

  So clean we did, but by noon Eleanor could no longer stand. So I took her home with me, because we were working down near the harbor section and my place was nearer.

  That’s almost the whole story – light to darkness to light – except for the end, which I don’t really know. I’ll tell you of its beginning, though …

  * * *

  I dropped her off at the head of the alleyway, and she went on toward my apartment while I parked the car. Why didn’t I keep her with me? I don’t know. Unless it was because the morning sun made the world seem at peace, despite its filth. Unless it was because I was in love and the darkness was over, and the spirit of the night had surely departed.

  I parked the car and started up the alley. I was halfway before the corner where I had met the org when I heard her cry out.

  I ran. Fear gave me speed and strength and I ran to the corner and turned it.

  The man had a bag, not unlike the one Chuck had carried away with him, lying beside the puddle in which he stood. He was going through Eleanor’s purse, and she lay on the ground – so still! – with blood on the side of her head.

  I cursed him and ran toward him, switching on my cane as I went. He turned, dropped her purse, and reached for the gun in his belt.

  We were about thirty feet apart, so I threw my cane.

  He drew his gun, pointed it at me, and my cane fell into the puddle in which he stood.

  Flights of an
gels sang him to his rest, perhaps.

  She was breathing, so I got her inside and got hold of a doctor – I don’t remember how, not too clearly, anyway – and I waited and waited.

  She lived for another twelve hours and then she died. She recovered consciousness twice before they operated on her, and not again after. She didn’t say anything. She smiled at me once, and went to sleep again.

  I don’t know.

  Anything, really.

  It happened again that I became Betty’s mayor, to fill in until November, to oversee the rebuilding. I worked, I worked my head off, and I left her bright and shiny, as I had found her. I think I could have won if I had run for the job that fall, but I did not want it.

  The Town Council overrode my objections and voted to erect a statue of Godfrey Justin Holmes beside the statue of Eleanor Schirer which was to stand in the Square across from cleaned-up Wyeth. I guess it’s out there now.

  I said that I would never return, but who knows? In a couple of years, after some more history has passed, I may revisit a Betty full of strangers, if only to place a wreath at the foot of the one statue. Who knows but that the entire continent may be steaming and clanking and whirring with automation by then, and filled with people from shore to shining shore?

  There was a Stopover at the end of the year and I waved goodbye and climbed aboard and went away, anywhere.

  I went aboard and went away, to sleep again the cold sleep.

  Delirium of ship among stars –

  Years have passed, I suppose. I’m not really counting them any more. But I think of this thing often: Perhaps there is a Golden Age someplace, a Renaissance for me sometime, a special time somewhere, somewhere but a ticket, a visa, a diary-page away. I don’t know where or when. Who does? Where are all the rains of yesterday?

  In the invisible city?

  Inside me?

  It is cold and quiet outside and the horizon is infinity. There is no sense of movement.

  There is no moon, and the stars are very bright, like broken diamonds, all.

  R. A. LAFFERTY

  Narrow Valley

  R. A. Lafferty is not usually listed as one of the major authors of the New Wave era, and yet, for me, the stories he published in the magazines and anthologies of the mid-’60s had as much to do with establishing the special excitement of that era as anything by Delany or Zelazny or Disch. Certainly they were, in their own quirky way, just as radical and revolutionary, and every bit as effective in shattering worn-out old molds and letting us suddenly see wild new possibilities in what could be done with the science fiction short story. If nothing else, the sheer wonderful brass it took to give characters names like Aloysius Shiplap, Willy McGilly, Diogenes Pontifex, or Basil Bagelbaker, and get away with it, was admirable.

  Lafferty has published memorable novels that stand up quite well today – among the best of them are Past Master, The Devil Is Dead, The Reefs of Earth, the historical novel Okla Hannali, and the totally unclassifiable (a fantasy novel disguised as a non-fiction historical study, perhaps?) The Fall of Rome – but it was the prolific stream of short stories he began publishing in 1960 that would eventually establish his reputation. Stories like “Slow Tuesday Night,” “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne,” “Hog-Belly Honey,” “The Hole on the Corner,” “All Pieces of a River Shore,” “Among the Hairy Earthmen,” “Seven Day Teror,” “Continued on Next Rock,” “The Configuration of the Northern Shore,” “All But the Words” and many others, are among the freshest and funniest SF ever written. At his best, Lafferty possessed one of the most outlandish imaginations in all of SF, a store of offbeat erudition matched only by Avram Davidson, and a strong, shaggy sense of humor unrivaled by anyone. His stories have been gathered in the landmark collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers, as well as in Strange Doings, Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? and Ringing the Changes.

  Outlandish and richly strange, “Narrow Valley” is one of Lafferty’s best, and is wildly imaginative even by his standards. It is also very funny.

  Lafferty retired from writing in 1987, at age seventy. Much of his work in the decade of the ’80s – like the very strange novel Archipelago – is available only in small press editions or as chapbooks. His novel My Heart Leaps Up is being serialized as a series of chapbooks, three chapters at a time, a project that could take years to complete. But his other books in trade editions include The Flame Is Green, Arrive at Easterwine, Space Chantey, and Fourth Mansions. Lafferty won the Hugo Award in 1973 for his story “Eurema’s Dam,” and in 1990 received a World Fantasy Award, the prestigious Life Achievement Award. He lives in Oklahoma.

  In the year 1893, land allotments in severalty were made to the remaining eight hundred and twenty-one Pawnee Indians. Each would receive one hundred and sixty acres of land and no more, and thereafter the Pawnees would be expected to pay taxes on their land, the same as the White-Eyes did.

  “Kitkehahke!” Clarence Big-Saddle cussed. “You can’t kick a dog around proper on a hundred and sixty acres. And I sure am not hear before about this pay taxes on land.”

  Clarence Big-Saddle selected a nice green valley for his allotment. It was one of the half-dozen plots he had always regarded as his own. He sodded around the summer lodge that he had there and made it an all-season home. But he sure didn’t intend to pay taxes on it.

  So he burned leaves and bark and made a speech:

  “That my valley be always wide and flourish and green and such stuff as that!” he orated in Pawnee chant style. “But that it be narrow if an intruder come.”

  He didn’t have any balsam bark to burn. He threw on a little cedar bark instead. He didn’t have any elder leaves. He used a handful of jack-oak leaves. And he forgot the word. How you going to work it if you forget the word?

  “Petahauerat!” he howled out with the confidence he hoped would fool the fates.

  “That’s the same long of a word,” he said in a low aside to himself. But he was doubtful. “What am I, a White Man, a burr-tailed jack, a new kind of nut to think it will work?” he asked. “I have to laugh at me. Oh well, we see.”

  He threw the rest of the bark and the leaves on the fire, and he hollered the wrong word out again.

  And he was answered by a dazzling sheet of summer lightning.

  “Skidi!” Clarence Big-Saddle swore. “It worked. I didn’t think it would.”

  Clarence Big-Saddle lived on his land for many years, and he paid no taxes. Intruders were unable to come down to his place. The land was sold for taxes three times, but nobody ever came down to claim it. Finally, it was carried as open land on the books. Homesteaders filed on it several times, but none of them fulfilled the qualification of living on the land.

  Half a century went by. Clarence Big-Saddle called his son.

  “I’ve had it, boy,” he said. “I think I’ll just go in the house and die.”

  “Okay, Dad,” the son Clarence Little-Saddle said. “I’m going in to town to shoot a few games of pool with the boys. I’ll bury you when I get back this evening.”

  So the son Clarence Little-Saddle inherited. He also lived on the land for many years without paying taxes.

  There was a disturbance in the courthouse one day. The place seemed to be invaded in force, but actually there were but one man, one woman, and five children. “I’m Robert Rampart,” said the man, “and we want the Land Office.”

  “I’m Robert Rampart Junior,” said a nine-year-old gangler, “and we want it pretty blamed quick.”

  “I don’t think we have anything like that,” the girl at the desk said. “Isn’t that something they had a long time ago?”

  “Ignorance is no excuse for inefficiency, my dear,” said Mary Mabel Rampart, an eight-year-old who could easily pass for eight and a half. “After I make my report, I wonder who will be sitting at your desk tomorrow.”

  “You people are either in the wrong state or the wrong century,” the girl said.

  “The Homestead Act still obtains,” Robert
Rampart insisted. “There is one tract of land carried as open in this county. I want to file on it.”

  Cecilia Rampart answered the knowing wink of a beefy man at the distant desk. “Hi,” she breathed as she slinked over. “I’m Cecilia Rampart, but my stage name is Cecilia San Juan. Do you think that seven is too young to play ingenue roles?”

  “Not for you,” the man said. “Tell your folks to come over here.”

  “Do you know where the Land Office is?” Cecilia asked.

  “Sure. It’s the fourth left-hand drawer of my desk. The smallest office we got in the whole courthouse. We don’t use it much any more.”

  The Ramparts gathered around. The beefy man started to make out the papers.

  “This is the land description,” Robert Rampart began. “Why, you’ve got it down already. How did you know?”

  “I’ve been around here a long time,” the man answered.

  They did the paper work, and Robert Rampart filed on the land.

  “You won’t be able to come onto the land itself, though,” the man said.

  “Why won’t I?” Rampart demanded. “Isn’t the land description accurate?”

  “Oh, I suppose so. But nobody’s ever been able to get to the land. It’s become a sort of joke.”

  “Well, I intend to get to the bottom of that joke,” Rampart insisted. “I will occupy the land, or I will find out why not.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” the beefy man said. “The last man to file on the land, about a dozen years ago, wasn’t able to occupy the land. And he wasn’t able to say why he couldn’t. It’s kind of interesting, the look on their faces after they try it for a day or two, and then give it up.”

  The Ramparts left the courthouse, loaded into their camper, and drove out to find their land. They stopped at the house of a cattle and wheat farmer named Charley Dublin. Dublin met them with a grin which indicated he had been tipped off.