The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Here he takes us on a wild, headlong, and tautly suspenseful chase through time, and into worlds where nothing—nothing—is as it seems …

  I. Chiaroscuro

  I awoke in camp that morning to find the highway to Boulder gone, the sky empty of contrails, and the aspen leaves a bright autumn gold despite what should have been a midsummer day, but after bouncing the Jeep across four miles of forest and rocky ridgeline to the back of the Flatirons, it was the sight of the Inland Sea that stopped me cold.

  “Damn,” I muttered, getting out of the Jeep and walking to the edge of the cliff.

  Where the foothills and plains should have been, the great sea stretched away east to the horizon and beyond. Torpid waves lapped up against the muddy shores below. Where the stone-box towers of NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, had risen below the sandstone slabs of the Flatirons, now there were only shrub-stippled swamps and muddy inlets. Of Boulder, there was no sign—neither of its oasis of trees nor of its low buildings. Highway 36 did not cut its accustomed swath over the hillside southeast to Denver. No roads were visible. The high-rises of Denver were gone. All of Denver was gone. Only the Inland Sea stretched east and north and south as far as I could see, its color the gray-blue I remembered from Lake Michigan in my youth, its wave action desultory, its sound more the halfhearted lapping of a large lake than the surf crash of a real ocean.

  “Damn,” I said again and pulled the Remington from its scabbard behind the driver’s seat of the Jeep. Using the twenty-power sight, I scanned the gullies leading down between the Flatirons to the swamps and shoreline. There were no roads, no paths, not even visible animal trails. I planted my foot on a low boulder, braced my arm on my knee, and tried to keep the scope steady as I panned right to left along the long strip of dark shoreline.

  Footprints in the mud: one set, leading from the gully just below where I stood on what someday would be named Flagstaff Mountain and crossing to a small rowboat pulled up on the sand just beyond the curl of waves. No one was in the rowboat. No tracks led away from it.

  A bit of color and motion caught my eye a few hundred meters out from the shore and I raised the rifle, trying to steady the scope on a bobbing bit of yellow. There was a float out there, just beyond the shallows.

  I lowered the Remington and took a step closer to the drop-off. There was no way that I could get the Jeep down there—at least not without spending hours or days cutting a path through the thick growth of ponderosa and lodgepole pine that grew in the gully. And even then I would have to use the winch to lower the Jeep over boulders and near-vertical patches. It would not be worth the effort to take the vehicle. But it would require an hour or more to hike down from here.

  For what? I thought. The rowboat and buoy would be another red herring, another Kelly Dahl joke. Or she’s trying to lure me out there on the water so that she can get a clean shot.

  “Damn,” I said for the third and final time. Then I returned the rifle to its case, pulled out the blue daypack, checked to make sure that the rations, water bottles, and .38 were in place, tugged on the pack, shifted the Ka-bar knife in its sheath along my belt so that I could get to it in one movement, set the rifle scabbard in the crook of my arm, took one last look at the Jeep and its contents, and began the long descent.

  Kelly, you’re sloppy, I thought as I slid down the muddy slope, using aspens as handholds. Nothing’s consistent. You’ve screwed this up just like you did the Triassic yesterday.

  This particular Inland Sea could be from one of several eras—the late Cretaceous for one, the late Jurassic for another—but in the former era, some 75 million years ago, the great interior sea would have pushed much further west than here, into Utah and beyond, and the Rocky Mountains I could see twenty miles to the west would have been in the process of being born from the remnants of Pacific islands that had dotted an ocean covering California. The slabs of Flatirons now rising above me would exist only as a layer of soft substrata. Conversely, if it were the mid-Jurassic, almost 100 million years earlier than the Cretaceous, this would all be part of a warm, shallow sea stretching down from Canada, ending in a shore winding along northern New Mexico. There would be a huge saline lake south of there, the mudflats of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico stretching as a narrow isthmus for almost two hundred miles between the two bodies of water. This area of central Colorado would be an island, but still without mountains and Flatirons.

  You got it all wrong, Kelly. I’d give this a D–. There was no answer. Shit, this isn’t even that good. An F. Still silence.

  Nor were the flora and fauna correct. Instead of the aspen and pine trees through which I now descended, this area should have been forested during the Jurassic by tall, slender, cycadlike trees, festooned with petals and cones; the undergrowth would not be the juniper bushes I was picking my way around but exotic scouring rushes displaying leaves like banana plants. The late-Cretaceous flora would have been more familiar to the eye—low, broad-leaved trees, towering conifers—but the blossoms would be profuse, tropical, and exotic—with the scent of huge, magnolialike blossoms perfuming the humid air.

  The air was neither hot nor humid. It was a midautumn Colorado day. The only blossoms I saw were the faded flowers on small cacti underfoot.

  The fauna were wrong. And dull. Dinosaurs existed in both the Cretaceous and Jurassic, but the only animals I had seen this fine morning were some ravens, three white-tailed deer hustling for cover a mile before I reached the cliffs, and some golden-mantled ground squirrels near the top of the Flatirons. Unless a plesiosaur raised its scrawny neck out of the water below, my guess was that the Inland Sea had been transplanted to our era. I had been mildly disappointed the last couple of times the chase had taken me through ancient eras. I would like to have seen a dinosaur, if only to see if Spielberg and his computer animators had been correct as to how the creatures moved.

  Kelly, you’re sloppy, I thought again. Lazy. Or you make your choices from sentiment and a sense of aesthetics rather than from any care for accuracy. I was not surprised that there was no answer.

  Kelly had always been quirky, although I remembered little sentimentality from either of the times I had been her teacher.

  I thought, She hadn’t cried the time I left the sixth-grade class to take the high-school job. Most of the other girls did. Kelly Dahl was 11 then. She had not shown much emotion when I’d had her in English class when she was … what?… seventeen.

  And now she was trying to kill me. Not much sentiment there, either.

  I came out of the woods at the edge of the gully and began following human footprints in the mud across the flats. Whether the Inland Sea was from the Jurassic or the Cretaceous, the person who had crossed these tidal flats before me had worn sneakers—cross-trainers from the look of the sole patterns. Are these tidal flats? I think so … the Kansas Sea was large enough to respond to tides.

  There was nothing in the rowboat but two oars, shipped properly. I glanced around, took the rifle out to scope the cliffsides, saw nothing there, tossed the pack in the boat, set the Remington across my lap, shoved off through low waves, and began to row toward the yellow buoy.

  I half expected a rifle shot, but suspected that I would not hear it. Despite her missed chances a few days earlier, Kelly Dahl was obviously a good shot. When she decided to kill me, if she had a shot as clear as this one must be—she could fire from any spot along the cliff face of the Flatirons—I would almost certainly be hit on her first try. My only chance was that it would not be a fatal shot and that I could still handle the Remington.

  Sweating, the rifle now on the thwart behind me, my shirt soaked from the exertion despite the cool autumn air, I thought of how vulnerable I was out here on the chalky sea, how stupid this action was. I managed to grunt a laugh.

  Do your worst, kid. Sunlight glinted on something behind the rocks on Flagstaff Mountain. A telescopic sight? My Jeep’s windshield? I did not break the rhythm of my rowing to check it out. Do
your worst, kid. It can’t be worse than what I had planned for myself.

  The yellow “buoy” was actually a plastic bleach jar. There was a line tied to it. I pulled it up. The wine bottle on the end of it was weighted with pebbles and sealed with a cork. There was a note inside.

  BANG, it read. YOU’RE IT.

  * * *

  On the day I decided to kill myself, I planned it, prepared it, and carried it out. Why wait?

  The irony was that I had always detested suicide and the suicides themselves. Papa Hemingway and his ilk, someone who will put a Boss shotgun in his mouth and pull the trigger, leaving the remains at the bottom of the stairs for his wife to find and a ceiling full of skull splinters for the hired help to remove … well, I find them disgusting. And self-indulgent. I have been a failure and a drunk and a fuckup, but I have never left my messes for others to clean up, not even in the worst depths of my drinking days.

  Still, it is hard to think of a way to kill yourself without leaving a mess behind. Walking into the ocean like James Mason at the end of the 1954 A Star Is Born would have been nice, assuming a strong current going out or sharks to finish off the waterlogged remains, but I live in Colorado. Drowning oneself in one of the puny reservoirs around here seems pathetic at best.

  All of the domestic remedies—gas, poison, hanging, an overdose of sleeping pills, the shotgun from the closet—leave someone with the Hemingway problem. Besides, I despise melodrama. The way I figure it, it’s no one’s business but my own how or why I go out. Of course, my ex-wife wouldn’t give a shit and my only child is dead and beyond embarrassment, but there are still a few friends out there from the good days who might feel betrayed if news of my death came in the black-wrapped package of suicide. Or so I like to think.

  It took me not quite three beers in the Bennigan’s on Canyon Boulevard to arrive at the answer; it took even less time to make the preparations and to carry them out.

  Some of the few things left me after the settlement with Maria were my Jeep and camping gear. Even while I was drinking, I would occasionally take off for the hills without notice, camping somewhere along the Peak to Peak Highway or in the national forest up Left Hand Canyon. While not a real off-road type—I hate four-wheel-drive assholes who pride themselves on tearing up the landscape, and all snowmobilers, and those idiots on motorcycles who befoul the wilderness with noise and fumes—I have been known to push the Jeep pretty hard to get to a campsite far enough back to where I wouldn’t have to listen to anyone’s radio or hear traffic or have to look at the rump end of some fat-assed Winnebago.

  There are mine shafts up there. Most of them are dug horizontally into the mountains and run only a few hundred feet back before ending in cave-in or flood. But some are sinkholes, some are pits where the soil has caved in above an old shaft. Some are vertical drop shafts, long since abandoned, that fall two hundred or three hundred feet to rocks and water and to whatever slimy things there are that like to live in such darkness.

  I knew where one of these drop shafts was—a deep one, with an opening wide enough to take the Jeep and me. It was way the hell above the canyon back there behind Sugarloaf Mountain, off the trail and marked by warning signs on trees, but someone trying to turn a Jeep around in the dusk or dark might drive into it easily enough. If he was stone stupid. Or if he was a known drunk.

  It was about seven on a July evening when I left Bennigan’s, picked up my camping stuff at the apartment on Thirtieth Street, and headed up north on Highway 36 along the foothills for three miles and then west up Left Hand Canyon. Even with the two or three hard miles of four-wheel-drive road, I figured I would be at the mine shaft before 8 P.M. There would be plenty of light left to do what I had to do.

  Despite the three beers, I was sober. I hadn’t had a real drink in almost two months. As an alcoholic, I knew that I wasn’t recovering by staying just on this side of the sober line, only suffering.

  But I wanted to be almost sober that night. I had been almost sober—only two beers, perhaps three—the evening that the pickup crossed the lane on Highway 287 and smashed into our Honda, killing Allan instantly and putting me into the hospital for three weeks. The driver of the pickup had survived, of course. They had tested his blood and found that he was legally drunk. He received a suspended sentence and lost his license for a year. I was so badly injured, it was so obvious that the pickup had been at fault, that no one had tested my blood-alcohol level. I’ll never know if I could have responded faster if it hadn’t been for those two or three beers.

  This time I wanted to know exactly what I was doing as I perched the Jeep on the edge of that twenty-foot opening, shifted into four-wheel low, and roared over the raised berm around the black circle of the pit.

  And I did. I did not hesitate. I did not lose my sense of pride at the last minute and write some bullshit farewell note to anyone. I didn’t think about it. I took my baseball cap off, wiped the faintest film of sweat from my forehead, set the cap on firmly, slammed the shifter into low, and roared over that mound of dirt like a pit bull going after a mailman’s ass.

  The sensation was almost like going over the second hill on the Wildcat ’coaster at Elitch Gardens. I had the urge to raise my arms and scream. I did not raise my arms; my hands stayed clamped to the wheel as the nose of the Jeep dropped into darkness as if I were driving into a tunnel. I had not turned the headlights on. I caught only the faintest glimpse of boulders and rotted timbers and layers of granite whipping by. I did not scream.

  * * *

  The last few days I have been trying to recall everything I can about Kelly Dahl when I taught her in the sixth grade, every conversation and interaction, but much of it is indistinct. I taught for almost twenty-six years, sixteen in the elementary grades and the rest in high school. Faces and names blur. But not because I was drinking heavily then. Kelly was in my last sixth-grade class and I didn’t really have a drinking problem then. Problems, yes; drinking problem, no.

  I remember noticing Kelly Dahl on the first day; any teacher worth his or her salt notices the troublemakers, the standouts, the teacher’s pets, the class clowns, and all of the other elementary-class stereotypes on the first day. Kelly Dahl did not fit any of the stereotypes, but she was certainly a standout kid. Physically, there was nothing unusual about her—at eleven she was losing the baby fat she’d carried through childhood, her bone structure was beginning to assert itself in her face, her hair was about shoulder length, brown, and somewhat stringier than the blow-dried fussiness or careful braidedness of the other girls. Truth was, Kelly Dahl carried a slight air of neglect and impoverishment about her, a look we teachers were all too familiar with in the mid-eighties, even in affluent Boulder County. The girl’s clothes were usually too small, rarely clean, and bore the telltale wrinkles of something dredged from the hamper or floor of the closet that morning. Her hair was, as I said, rarely washed and usually held in place by cheap plastic barrettes that she had probably worn since second grade. Her skin had that sallow look common to children who spent hours inside in front of the TV, although I later found that this was not the case with Kelly Dahl. She was that rarest of things—a child who had never watched TV.

  Few of my assumptions were correct about Kelly Dahl.

  What made Kelly stand out that first day of my last sixth-grade class were her eyes—startlingly green, shockingly intelligent, and surprisingly alert when not concealed behind her screen of boredom or hidden by her habit of looking away when called upon. I remember her eyes and the slightly mocking tone to her soft, eleven-year-old girl’s voice when I called on her the few times that first day.

  I recall that I read her file that evening—I made it a practice never to read the students’ cumulative folders before I met the actual child—and I probably looked into this one because Kelly’s careful diction and softly ironic tone contrasted so much with her appearance. According to the file, Kelly Dahl lived in the mobile-home park to the west of the tracks—the trailer park that gave our scho
ol the lion’s share of problems—with her mother, divorced, and a stepfather. There was a yellow Notice slip from second grade warning the teacher that Kelly’s biological father had held custody until that year, and that the court had removed the girl from that home because of rumors of abuse. I checked back in the single sheet from a county social worker who had visited the home and, reading between the lines of bureaucratese, inferred that the mother hadn’t wanted the child either but had given in to the court’s ruling. The biological father had been more than willing to give the girl up. Evidently it had been a noncustody battle, one of those “You take her, I have a life to live” exchanges that so many of my students had endured. The mother had lost and ended up with Kelly. The yellow Notice slip was the usual warning that the girl was not to be allowed to leave the school grounds with the biological father or be allowed to speak on the phone if he called the school, and if he were observed hanging around the school grounds, the teacher or her aide was to notify the principal and/or call the police. Too many of our kids’ files have yellow Notice slips with that sort of warning.