The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  “This portion of Search for Tomorrow has been brought to you by…Spic and Span, the all-purpose cleaner. And by…Joy dishwashing liquid. From grease to shine in half the time, with Joy. Our story will continue in just a moment.”

  I was up by times the next morning. Hadn’t kept milk cows in years. The last was Molly, she with the wet-weather horn, a funny-looking old gal but as calm and sweet as could be. But if you’ve milked cows for seventy years, it’s hard to give in and let the sun start beating you to the day. By first light I’d had my Cream of Wheat, a child’s meal I’d developed a taste for, with a little jerp of honey, and was out in the back field, bee hunting.

  I had three sugar-dipped corncobs in a croker sack, and I laid one out on a hickory stump, notched one into the top of a fencepost, and set the third atop the boulder at the start of the path that drops down to the creek, past the old lick-log where the salt still keeps the grass from growing. Then I settled down on an old milkstool to wait. I gave up snuff a while ago because I couldn’t taste it no more and the price got so high with taxes that I purely hated putting all that government in my mouth, but I still carry some little brushes to chew on in dipping moments, and I chewed on one while I watched those three corncobs do nothing. I’d set down where I could see all three without moving my head, just by darting my eyes from one to the other. My eyes may not see Search for Tomorrow so good anymore, even before the aerial got bent, but they still can sight a honeybee coming in to sip the bait.

  The cob on the stump got the first business, but that bee just smelled around and then buzzed off straightaway, so I stayed set where I was. Same thing happened to the post cob and to the rock cob, three bees come and gone. But then a big bastard, one I could hear coming in like an airplane twenty feet away, zoomed down on the fence cob and stayed there a long time, filling his hands. He rose up all lazy-like, just like a man who’s lifted the jug too many times in a sitting, and then made one, two, three slow circles in the air, marking the position. When he flew off, I was right behind him, legging it into the woods.

  Mister Big Bee led me a ways straight up the slope, toward the well of the old McQuarry place, but then he crossed the bramble patch, and by the time I had worked my way anti-goddlin around that, I had lost sight of him. So I listened for a spell, holding my breath, and heard a murmur like a branch in a direction where there warn’t no branch. Sure enough, over thataway was a big hollow oak with a bee highway a-coming and a-going through a seam in the lowest fork. Tell the truth, I wasn’t rightly on my own land anymore. The McQuarry place belonged to a bank in Cape Girardeau, if it belonged to anybody. But no one had blazed this tree yet, so my claim would be good enough for any bee hunter. I sidled around to just below the fork and notched an X where any fool could see it, even me, because I had been known to miss my own signs some days, or rummage the bureau for a sock that was already on my foot. Something about the way I’d slunk toward the hive the way I’d slunk toward the door the day before made me remember Miss Press, whom I’d plumb forgotten about. And when I turned back toward home, in the act of folding my pocketknife, there she was sitting on the lumpy leavings of the McQuarry chimney, a-kicking her feet and waving at me, just like I had wished her out of the ground. I’d have to go past her to get home, as I didn’t relish turning my back on her and heading around the mountain, down the long way to the macadam and back around. Besides, she’d just follow me anyway, the way she followed me out here. I unfolded my knife again and snatched up a walnut stick to whittle on as I stomped along to where she sat.

  “Hello, Mr. Nelson,” she said. “Can we start over?”

  “I ain’t a-talking to you,” I said as I passed, pointing at her with my blade. “I ain’t even a-walking with you,” I added, as she slid off the rockpile and walked along beside. “I’m taking the directedest path home, is all, and where you choose to walk is your own lookout. Fall in a hole and I’ll just keep a-going, I swear I will. I’ve done it before, left reporters in the woods to die.”

  “Aw, I don’t believe you have,” she said, in a happy singsongy way. At least she was dressed for a tramp through the woods, in denim jeans and mannish boots with no heels to them, but wearing the same face-paint and fool hat, and in a red sweater that fit as close as her dress had. “But I’m not walking with you, either,” she went on. “I’m walking alone, just behind you. You can’t even see me, without turning your head. We’re both walking alone, together.”

  I didn’t say nothing.

  “Are we near where it landed?” she asked.

  I didn’t say nothing.

  “You haven’t had one of your picnics lately, have you?”

  I didn’t say nothing.

  “You ought to have another one.”

  I didn’t say nothing.

  “I’m writing a story,” she said, “about Close Encounters. You know, the new movie? With Richard Dreyfuss? He was in The Goodbye Girl, and Jaws, about the shark? Did you see those? Do you go to any movies?” Some critter we had spooked, maybe a turkey, went thrashing off through the brush, and I heard her catch her breath. “I bet you saw Deliverance,” she said.

  I didn’t say nothing.

  “My editor thought it’d be interesting to talk to people who really have, you know, claimed their own close encounters, to have met people from outer space. Contactees, that’s the word, right? You were one of the first contactees, weren’t you, Mr. Nelson? When was it, 1956?”

  I didn’t say nothing.

  “Aw, come on, Mr. Nelson. Don’t be so mean. They all talked to me out in California. Mr. Bethurum talked to me.”

  I bet he did, I thought. Truman Bethurum always was a plumb fool for a skirt.

  “I talked to Mr. Fry, and to Mr. King, and Mr. Owens. I talked to Mr. Angelucci.”

  Orfeo Angelucci, I thought, now there was one of the world’s original liars, as bad as Adamski. “Those names don’t mean nothing to me,” I said.

  “They told similar stories to yours, in the fifties and sixties. Meeting the Space Brothers, and being taken up, and shown wonders, and coming back to the Earth, with wisdom and all.”

  “If you talked to all them folks,” I said, “you ought to be brim full of wisdom yourself. Full of something. Why you need to hound an old man through the woods?”

  “You’re different,” she said. “You know lots of things the others don’t.”

  “Lots of things, uh-huh. Like what?”

  “You know how to hunt bees, don’t you?”

  I snorted. “Hunt bees. You won’t never need to hunt no bees, Miss Press. Priss. You can buy your honey at the A and the P. Hell, if you don’t feel like going to the store, you could just ask, and some damn fool would bring it to you for free on a silver tray.”

  “Well, thank you,” she said.

  “That warn’t no compliment,” I said. “That was a clear-eyed statement of danger, like a sign saying, ‘Bridge out,’ or a label saying, ‘Poison.’ Write what you please, Miss Priss, but don’t expect me to give you none of the words. You know all the words you need already.”

  “But you used to be so open about your experiences, Mr. Nelson. I’ve read that to anyone who found their way here off the highway, you’d tell about the alien Bob Solomon, and how that beam from the saucer cured your lumbago, and all that good pasture land on Mars. Why, you had all those three-day picnics, right here on your farm, for anyone who wanted to come talk about the Space Brothers. You’d even hand out little Baggies with samples of hair from your four-hundred-pound Venusian dog.”

  I stopped and whirled on her, and she hopped back a step, nearly fell down. “He warn’t never no four hundred pounds,” I said. “You reporters sure do believe some stretchers. You must swallow whole eggs for practice like a snake. I’ll have you know, Miss Priss, that Bo just barely tipped three hundred and eighty-five pounds at his heaviest, and that was on the truck scales behind the Union 76 in June 1960, the day he ate all the sileage, and Clay Rector, who ran all their inspections back then, tol
d me those scales would register the difference if you took the Rand McNally atlas out of the cab, so that figure ain’t no guesswork.” When I paused for breath, I kinda shook myself, turned away from her gaping face, and walked on. “From that day,” I said, “I put old Bo on a science diet, one I got from the Extension, and I measured his rations, and I hitched him ever day to a sledge of felled trees and boulders and such, because dogs, you know, they’re happier with a little exercise, and he settled down to around, oh, three-ten, three-twenty, and got downright frisky again. He’d romp around and change direction and jerk that sledge around, and that’s why those three boulders are a-sitting in the middle of yonder pasture today, right where he slung them out of the sledge. Four hundred pounds, my foot. You don’t know much, if that’s what you know, and that’s a fact.”

  I was warmed up by the walk and the spreading day and my own strong talk, and I set a smart pace, but she loped along beside me, writing in her notebook with a silver pen that flashed as it caught the sun. “I stand corrected,” she said. “So what happened? Why’d you stop the picnics, and start running visitors off with a shotgun, and quit answering your mail?”

  “You can see your own self what happened,” I said. “Woman, I got old. You’ll see what it’s like, when you get there. All the people who believed in me died, and then the ones who humored me died, and now even the ones who feel obligated to sort of tolerate me are starting to go. Bo died, and Teddy, that was my Earth-born dog, he died, and them government boys went to the Moon and said they didn’t see no mining operations or colony domes or big Space Brother dogs, or nothing else old Buck had seen up there. And in place of my story, what story did they come up with? I ask you. Dust and rocks and craters as far as you can see, and when you walk as far as that, there’s another sight of dust and rocks and craters, and so on all around till you’re back where you started, and that’s it, boys, wash your hands, that’s the Moon done. Excepting for some spots where the dust is so deep a body trying to land would just be swallowed up, sink to the bottom, and at the bottom find what? Praise Jesus, more dust, just what we needed. They didn’t see nothing that anybody would care about going to see. No floating cars, no lakes of diamonds, no topless Moon gals, just dumb dull nothing. Hell, they might as well a been in Arkansas. You at least can cast a line there, catch you a bream. Besides, my lumbago come back,” I said, easing myself down into the rocker, because we was back on my front porch by then. “It always comes back, my doctor says. Doctors plural, I should say. I’m on the third one now. The first two died on me. That’s something, ain’t it? For a man to outlive two of his own doctors?”

  Her pen kept a-scratching as she wrote. She said, “Maybe Bob Solomon’s light beam is still doing you some good, even after all this time.”

  “Least it didn’t do me no harm. From what all they say now about the space people, I’m lucky old Bob didn’t jam a post-hole digger up my ass and send me home with the screaming meemies and three hours of my life missing. That’s the only aliens anybody cares about nowadays, big-eyed boogers with long cold fingers in your drawers. Doctors from space. Well, if they want to take three hours of my life, they’re welcome to my last trip to the urologist. I reckon it was right at three hours, and I wish them joy of it.”

  “Not so,” she said. “What about Star Wars? It’s already made more money than any other movie ever made, more than Gone with the Wind, more than The Sound of Music. That shows people are still interested in space, and in friendly aliens. And this new Richard Dreyfuss movie I was telling you about is based on actual UFO case files. Dr. Hynek helped with it. That’ll spark more interest in past visits to Earth.”

  “I been to ever doctor in the country, seems like,” I told her, “but I don’t recall ever seeing Dr. Hynek.”

  “How about Dr. Rutledge?”

  “Is he the toenail man?”

  She swatted me with her notebook. “Now you’re just being a pain,” she said. “Dr. Harley Rutledge, the scientist, the physicist. Over at Southeast Missouri State. That’s no piece from here. He’s been doing serious UFO research for years, right here in the Ozarks. You really ought to know him. He’s been documenting the spooklights. Like the one at Hornet, near Neosho?”

  “I’ve heard tell of that light,” I told her, “but I didn’t know no scientist cared about it.”

  “See?” she said, almost a squeal, like she’d opened a present, like she’d proved something. “A lot has happened since you went home and locked the door. More people care about UFOs and flying saucers and aliens today than they did in the 1950s, even. You should have you another picnic.”

  Once I got started talking, I found her right easy to be with, and it was pleasant a-sitting in the sun talking friendly with a pretty gal, or with anyone. It’s true, I’d been powerful lonesome, and I had missed those picnics, all those different types of folks on the farm who wouldn’t have been brought together no other way, in no other place, by nobody else. I was prideful of them. But I was beginning to notice something funny. To begin with, Miss Priss, whose real name I’d forgot by now, had acted like someone citified and paper-educated and standoffish. Now, the longer she sat on my porch a-jawing with me, the more easeful she got, and the more country she sounded, as if she’d lived in the hollow her whole life. It sorta put me off. Was this how Mike Wallace did it on 60 Minutes, pretending to be just regular folks, until you forgot yourself, and were found out?

  “Where’d you say you were from?” I asked.

  “Mars,” she told me. Then she laughed. “Don’t get excited,” she said. “It’s a town in Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh. I’m based out of Chicago, though.” She cocked her head, pulled a frown, stuck out her bottom lip. “You didn’t look at my card,” she said. “I pushed it under your door yesterday, when you were being so all-fired rude.”

  “I didn’t see it,” I said, which warn’t quite a lie because I hadn’t bothered to pick it up off the floor this morning, either. In fact, I’d plumb forgot to look for it.

  “You ought to come out to Clearwater Lake tonight. Dr. Rutledge and his students will be set up all night, ready for whatever. He said I’m welcome. That means you’re welcome, too. See? You have friends in high places. They’ll be set up at the overlook, off the highway. Do you know it?”

  “I know it,” I told her.

  “Can you drive at night? You need me to come get you?” She blinked and chewed her lip, like a thought had just struck. “That might be difficult,” she said.

  “Don’t exercise yourself,” I told her. “I reckon I still can drive as good as I ever did, and my pickup still gets the job done, too. Not that I aim to drive all that ways, just to look at the sky. I can do that right here on my porch.”

  “Yes,” she said, “alone. But there’s something to be said for looking up in groups, wouldn’t you agree?”

  When I didn’t say nothing, she stuck her writing-pad back in her pocketbook and stood up, dusting her butt with both hands. You’d think I never swept the porch. “I appreciate the interview, Mr. Nelson.”

  “Warn’t no interview,” I told her. “We was just talking, is all.”

  “I appreciate the talking, then,” she said. She set off across the yard, toward the gap in the rhododendron bushes that marked the start of the driveway. “I hope you can make it tonight, Mr. Nelson. I hope you don’t miss the show.”

  I watched her sashay off around the bush, and I heard her boots crunching the gravel for a few steps, and then she was gone, footsteps and all. I went back in the house, latched the screen door and locked the wood, and took one last look through the front curtains, to make sure. Some folks, I had heard, remembered only long afterward they’d been kidnapped by spacemen, a “retrieved memory” they called it, like finding a ball on the roof in the fall that went up there in the spring. Those folks needed a doctor to jog them, but this reporter had jogged me. All that happy talk had loosened something inside me, and things I hadn’t thought about in years were welling up like a fla
sh flood, like a sickness. If I was going to be memory-sick, I wanted powerfully to do it alone, as if alone was something new and urgent, and not what I did ever day.

  I closed the junk-room door behind me as I yanked the light on. The swaying bulb on its chain rocked the shadows back and forth as I dragged from beneath a shelf a crate of cheap splinter wood, so big it could have held two men if they was dead. Once I drove my pickup to the plant to pick up a bulk of dog food straight off the dock, cheaper that way, and this was one of the crates it come in. It still had that faint high smell. As it slid, one corner snagged and ripped the carpet, laid open the orange shag to show the knotty pine beneath. The shag was threadbare, but why bother now buying a twenty-year rug? Three tackle boxes rattled and jiggled on top of the crate, two yawning open and one rusted shut, and I set all three onto the floor. I lifted the lid of the crate, pushed aside the top layer, a fuzzy blue blanket, and started lifting things out one at a time. I just glanced at some, spent more time with others. I warn’t looking for anything in particular, just wanting to touch them and weigh them in my hands, and stack the memories up all around, in a back room under a bare bulb.