Modern Classics of Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  DT heard Dantzler’s footfalls and glanced up. “Waste him!” he shouted, pointing to Moody.

  Moody did not turn from contemplation of the knife. “No,” he said, as if speaking to someone whose image was held in the blade.

  “Waste him, man!” screamed DT. “He killed LeDoux!”

  “Please,” said Moody to the knife. “I don’t want to.”

  There was blood clotted on his face, more blood on the banana leaves sticking out of his helmet.

  “Did you kill Jerry?” asked Dantzler; while he addressed the question to Moody, he did not relate to him as an individual, only as part of a design whose message he had to unravel.

  “Jesus Christ! Waste him!” DT smashed his fist against the ground in frustration.

  “Okay,” said Moody. With an apologetic look, he sprang to his feet and charged Dantzler, swinging the knife.

  Emotionless, Dantzler stitched a line of fire across Moody’s chest; he went sideways into the bushes and down.

  “What the hell was you waitin’ for!” DT tried to rise, but winced and fell back. “Damn! Don’t know if I can walk.”

  “Pop a few,” Dantzler suggested mildly.

  “Yeah. Good thinkin’, man.” DT fumbled for his dispenser.

  Dantzler peered into the bushes to see where Moody had fallen. He felt nothing, and this pleased him. He was weary of feeling.

  DT popped an ampule with a flourish, as if making a toast, and inhaled. “Ain’t you gon’ to do some, man?”

  “I don’t need them,” said Dantzler. “I’m fine.”

  The stream interested him; it did not reflect the mist, as he had supposed, but was itself a seam of the mist.

  “How many you think they was?” asked DT.

  “How many what?”

  “Beaners, man! I wasted three or four after they hit us, but I couldn’t tell how many they was.”

  Dantzler considered this in light of his own interpretation of events and Moody’s conversation with the knife. It made sense. A Santa Ana kind of sense.

  “Beats me,” he said. “But I guess there’s less than there used to be.”

  DT snorted. “You got that right!” He heaved to his feet and limped to the edge of the stream. “Gimme a hand across.”

  Dantzler reached out to him, but instead of taking his hand, he grabbed his wrist and pulled him off-balance. DT teetered on his good leg, then toppled and vanished beneath the mist. Dantzler had expected him to fall, but he surfaced instantly, mist clinging to his skin. Of course, thought Dantzler; his body would have to die before his spirit would fall.

  “What you doin’, man?” DT was more disbelieving than enraged.

  Dantzler planted a foot in the middle of his back and pushed him down until his head was submerged. DT bucked and clawed at the foot and managed to come to his hands and knees. Mist slithered from his eyes, his nose, and he choked out the words “… kill you.…” Dantzler pushed him down again; he got into pushing him down and letting him up, over and over. Not so as to torture him. Not really. It was because he had suddenly understood the nature of the ayahuamaco’s laws, that they were approximations of normal laws, and he further understood that his actions had to approximate those of someone jiggling a key in a lock. DT was the key to the way out, and Dantzler was jiggling him, making sure all the tumblers were engaged.

  Some of the vessels in DT’s eyes had burst, and the whites were occluded by films of blood. When he tried to speak, mist curled from his mouth. Gradually his struggles subsided; he clawed runnels in the gleaming yellow dirt of the bank and shuddered. His shoulders were knobs of black land foundering in a mystic sea.

  For a long time after DT sank from view, Dantzler stood beside the stream, uncertain of what was left to do and unable to remember a lesson he had been taught. Finally he shouldered his rifle and walked away from the clearing. Morning had broken, the mist had thinned, and the forest had regained its usual coloration. But he scarcely noticed these changes, still troubled by his faulty memory. Eventually, he let it slide – it would all come clear sooner or later. He was just happy to be alive. After a while he began to kick the stones as he went, and to swing his rifle in a carefree fashion against the weeds.

  * * *

  When the First Infantry poured across the Nicaraguan border and wasted León, Dantzler was having a quiet time at the VA hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and at the precise moment the bulletin was flashed nationwide, he was sitting in the lounge, watching the American League playoffs between Detroit and Texas. Some of the patients ranted at the interruption, while others shouted them down, wanting to hear the details. Dantzler expressed no reaction whatsoever. He was solely concerned with being a model patient; however, noticing that one of the staff was giving him a clinical stare, he added his weight on the side of the baseball fans. He did not want to appear too controlled. The doctors were as suspicious of that sort of behavior as they were of its contrary. But the funny thing was – at least it was funny to Dantzler – that his feigned annoyance at the bulletin was an exemplary proof of his control, his expertise at moving through life the way he had moved through the golden leaves of the cloud forest. Cautiously, gracefully, efficiently. Touching nothing, and being touched by nothing. That was the lesson he had learned – to be as perfect a counterfeit of a man as the ayahuamaco had been of the land; to adopt the various stances of a man, and yet, by virtue of his distance from things human, to be all the more prepared for the onset of crisis or a call to action. He saw nothing aberrant in this; even the doctors would admit that men were little more than organized pretense. If he was different from other men, it was only that he had a deeper awareness of the principles on which his personality was founded.

  When the battle of Managua was joined, Dantzler was living at home. His parents had urged him to go easy in readjusting to civilian life, but he had immediately gotten a job as a management trainee in a bank. Each morning he would drive to work and spend a controlled, quiet eight hours; each night he would watch TV with his mother, and before going to bed, he would climb to the attic and inspect the trunk containing his souvenirs of war – helmet, fatigues, knife, boots. The doctors had insisted he face his experiences, and this ritual was his way of following their instructions. All in all, he was quite pleased with his progress, but he still had problems. He had not been able to force himself to venture out at night, remembering too well the darkness in the cloud forest, and he had rejected his friends, refusing to see them or answer their calls – he was not secure with the idea of friendship. Further, despite his methodical approach to life, he was prone to a nagging restlessness, the feeling of a chore left undone.

  One night his mother came into his room and told him that an old friend, Phil Curry, was on the phone. “Please talk to him, Johnny,” she said. “He’s been drafted, and I think he’s a little scared.”

  The word drafted struck a responsive chord in Dantzler’s soul, and after brief deliberation he went downstairs and picked up the receiver.

  “Hey,” said Phil. “What’s the story, man? Three months, and you don’t even give me a call.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Dantzler. “I haven’t been feeling so hot.”

  “Yeah, I understand.” Phil was silent a moment. “Listen, man. I’m leavin’, y’know, and we’re havin’ a big send-off at Sparky’s. It’s goin’ on right now. Why don’t you come down?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Jeanine’s here, man. Y’know, she’s still crazy ’bout you, talks ’bout you alla time. She don’t go out with nobody.”

  Dantzler was unable to think of anything to say.

  “Look,” said Phil, “I’m pretty weirded out by this soldier shit. I hear it’s pretty bad down there. If you got anything you can tell me ’bout what it’s like, man, I’d ’preciate it.”

  Dantzler could relate to Phil’s concern, his desire for an edge, and besides, it felt right to go. Very right. He would take some precautions against the darkness.

  “I
’ll be there,” he said.

  It was a foul night, spitting snow, but Sparky’s parking lot was jammed. Dantzler’s mind was flurried like the snow, crowded like the lot – thoughts whirling in, jockeying for position, melting away. He hoped his mother would not wait up, he wondered if Jeanine still wore her hair long, he was worried because the palms of his hands were unnaturally warm. Even with the car windows rolled up, he could hear loud music coming from inside the club. Above the door the words SPARKY’S ROCK CITY were being spelled out a letter at a time in red neon, and when the spelling was complete, the letters flashed off and on and a golden neon explosion bloomed around them. After the explosion, the entire sign went dark for a split second, and the big ramshackle building seemed to grow large and merge with the black sky. He had an idea it was watching him, and he shuddered – one of those sudden lurches downward of the kind that take you just before you fall asleep. He knew the people inside did not intend him any harm, but he also knew that places have a way of changing people’s intent, and he did not want to be caught off-guard. Sparky’s might be such a place, might be a huge black presence camouflaged by neon, its true substance one with the abyss of the sky, the phosphorescent snowflakes, jittering in his headlights, the wind keening through the side vent. He would have liked very much to drive home and forget about his promise to Phil; however, he felt a responsibility to explain about the war. More than a responsibility, an evangelistic urge. He would tell them about the kid falling out of the chopper, the white-haired girl in Tecolutla, the emptiness. God, yes! How you went down chock-full of ordinary American thoughts and dreams, memories of smoking weed and chasing tail and hanging out and freeway flying with a case of something cold, and how you smuggled back a human-shaped container of pure Salvadorian emptiness. Primo grade. Smuggled it back to the land of silk and money, of mindfuck video games and topless tennis matches and fast-food solutions to the nutritional problem. Just a taste of Salvador would banish all those trivial obsessions. Just a taste. It would be easy to explain.

  Of course, some things beggared explanation.

  He bent down and adjusted the survival knife in his boot so the hilt would not rub against his calf. From the coat pocket he withdrew the two ampules he had secreted in his helmet that long-ago night in the cloud forest. As the neon explosion flashed once more, glimmers of gold coursed along their shiny surfaces. He did not think he would need them; his hand was steady, and his purpose was clear. But to be on the safe side, he popped them both.

  PAT CADIGAN

  Pretty Boy Crossover

  One of the most brilliant and versatile of all the decade’s new writers, Pat Cadigan remains underappreciated to date, in spite of the fact that she is responsible for some of the best short work done by anybody in the ’80s.

  Cadigan first came to the attention of the SF world as co-editor, along with husband Arnie Fenner, of the long-running semiprozine Shayol, perhaps the best of the semiprozines of the late ’70s and early ’80s; it was honored with a World Fantasy Award in the “Special Achievement, Non-Professional” category in 1981. She made her first professional sale in 1980 to New Dimensions, and soon her jazzy, elegant, and incisive stories were turning up with some frequency in magazines like Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, as well as in horror markets like Shadows, Fears, The Twilight Zone Magazine, Ripper! and Tropical Chills.

  This wideness of range, in fact, may go a long way toward explaining why she is underappreciated. If you look only at her body of supernatural horror tales, stuff like “The Boys in the Rain,” “Two,” “The Pond,” “The Edge,” “My Brother’s Keeper,” “The Power and the Passion,” and “It Was the Heat,” you could make a pretty good argument that she was one of the rising young stars of the horror genre. But then, you look at all the pure-quill science fiction she’s written, much of it hard science fiction, at that … and then someone points out all the stuff by her that’s hard to categorize at all, stories like “Second Comings – Reasonable Rates,” “The Coming of the Doll,” “Another One Hits the Road,” “The Day the Martels Got the Cable.” Fantasy? Surrealism? Magic Realism? No, it’s been my experience that the harder a writer is to critically pigeonhole, the easier that writer is to ignore; this is a problem Cadigan shares with a number of other writers who refuse to stick within strict genre boundaries, or, worse, write unclassifiable stuff that blurs the distinctions between several genres – Cadigan does both.

  Within the SF field itself, Cadigan was best known in the mid-’80s for her sequence of hard-edged and elegant stories about “Deadpan Allie,” a sort of high-tech psychoanalyst of the future who can hook directly into another person’s mind to seek out the root causes of their psychological troubles; these stories were melded into her well-received first novel, Mindplayers. Toward the end of the ’80s, however, she began to produce work a quantum jump better than even her previous high standard, one of them the amazing story that follows, “Pretty Boy Crossover,” to my mind one of the very best stories of the decade.

  Besides being stylish, intelligent, and vivid, and accomplishing the difficult feat of being simultaneously compassionate and hard-edged, the best of Cadigan’s short works are marvels of compression and economy, with hardly a wasted word or an ounce of fat. At a time when the bookstore shelves are groaning with bloated and hugely padded four hundred-page novels that would have worked better as novelettes instead, Cadigan – in stories like “Pretty Boy Crossover,” “Rock On,” and “Angel” – is creating new and unique future societies, jam-packed with enough new ideas and background concepts and colorful bits of business for a four-hundred-page novel, and doing it all within the confines of four-thousand-word short stories. I suspect that Tiptree, who always admired elegance combined with a high-bit rate, and who had an absolute horror of padding, would have approved … and, in fact, much of Cadigan’s work reminds me strongly of Tiptree.

  (Speaking of Tiptree, it annoys me that several critics have ignored Cadigan in discussing – at great length – cyberpunk, and that least one critic has summarily read her out of the movement altogether, in spite of the fact that much of her work is aesthetically more central to that canon than the work of a couple of the core writers who are inevitably invoked in the usual cyberpunk litany. I suspect that some of these critics are made very uncomfortable by the idea that a girl should be allowed to play in the boys’ exclusive clubhouse – and I suspect that they would have been just as uncomfortable with Tiptree as well, in spite of her being an undoubted cyberpunk ancestor, if she had showed up wearing her Alice Sheldon suit.)

  Most of Cadigan’s best short fiction to date has been collected in Patterns, one of the two collections released in 1989 (the other is Bruce Sterling’s Crystal Express) that are vital if you want an idea of where the SF short story is going to be going in the ’90s. She has a new novel out, Synners, and she is working on another. She was born in Schenectady, New York, and now lives with her family in Overland Park, Kansas.

  First you see video. Then you wear video. Then you eat video. Then you be video.

  The Gospel According to Visual Mark

  Watch or Be watched.

  Pretty Boy Credo

  “Who made you?”

  “You mean recently?”

  Mohawk on the door smiles and takes his picture. “You in. But only you, okay? Don’t try to get no friends in, hear that?”

  “I hear. And I ain’t no fool, fool. I got no friends.”

  Mohawk leers, leaning forward. “Pretty Boy like you, no friends?”

  “Not in this world.” He pushes past the Mohawk, ignoring the kissy-kissy sounds. He would like to crack the bridge of the Mohawk’s nose and shove bone splinters into his brain but he is lately making more effort to control his temper and besides, he’s not sure if any of that bone splinters in the brain stuff is really true. He’s a Pretty Boy, all of sixteen years old, and tonight could be his last chance.

  * * *

&n
bsp; The club is Noise. Can’t sneak into the bathroom for quiet, the Noise is piped in there, too. Want to get away from Noise? Why? No reason. But this Pretty Boy has learned to think between the beats. Like walking between the raindrops to stay dry, but he can do it. This Pretty Boy thinks things all the time – all the time. Subversive (and, he thinks so much that he knows that word subversive, sixteen, Pretty, or not). He thinks things like how many Einsteins have died of hunger and thirst under a hot African sun and why can’t you remember being born and why is music common to every culture and especially how much was there going on that he didn’t know about and how could he find out about it.

  And this is all the time, one thing after another running in his head, you can see by his eyes. It’s for def not much like a Pretty Boy but it’s one reason why they want him. That he is a Pretty Boy is another and one reason why they’re halfway home getting him.

  He knows all about them. Everybody knows about them and everybody wants them to pause, look twice, and cough up a card that says, Yes, we see possibilities, please come to the following address during regular business hours on the next regular business day for regular further review. Everyone wants it but this Pretty Boy, who once got five cards in a night and tore them all up. But here he is, still a Pretty Boy. He thinks enough to know this is a failing in himself, that he likes being Pretty and chased and that is how they could end up getting him after all and that’s b-b-b-bad. When he thinks about it, he thinks it with the stutter. B-b-b-bad. B-b-b-bad for him because he doesn’t God help him want it, no, no n-n-n-no. Which may make him the strangest Pretty Boy still live tonight and every night.