Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

Some slight noise made her look back at the boulder field. Tory’s face was appearing on each of the stones, every face slightly different, so that he gazed upon her with a dozen expressions of love. Elin shivered at how alien he had become. “Your need is greater than your fear,” he said, the words bouncing back and forth between faces. “No matter what you think now, by morning you will be part of us.”

  Elin did not reply immediately. There was something in her hand—Tory’s terminal. It was small, and weighed hardly at all. She had brought it along without thinking.

  A small, bleak cry came from overhead, then several others. Nighthawks were feeding on insects near the dome roof. They were too far, too fast, and too dark to be visible from here. “Can you understand that? I

  “The price is too high,” she said at last. “Can you understand that? I won’t give up my humanity for you.”

  She hefted the terminal in her hand, then threw it as far and as hard as she could. She did not hear it fall.

  Elin turned and walked away.

  Behind her, the rocks smiled knowingly.

  JACK DANN

  Bad Medicine

  “Magic is alive,” declares one line of a well-known poem by Leonard Cohen, and it certainly is alive and afoot in the taut and scary story that follows, which explores the Old Ways and unknown forces which still exist everywhere on the periphery of our brightly-lit and tidily-rational modern world …

  One of the most respected writer/editors of his generation, Jack Dann began writing in 1970 and first established his reputation with the critically acclaimed novella “Junction,” which was a Nebula finalist in 1973; he has been a Nebula finalist six more times since then, and a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. His short fiction has appeared in Omni, Orbit, Playboy, Penthouse, New Dimensions, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Shadows, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Berkley Showcase, and elsewhere. His books include the novels Starhiker and Junction, and Timetipping, a collection of his short fiction. As an anthologist, he edited one of the most famous anthologies of the ’70s, Wandering Stars, a collection of fantasy and SF on Jewish themes; his other anthologies include More Wandering Stars, Immortal, Faster Than Light (co-edited with George Zebrowski), and several anthologies co-edited with Gardner Dozois: Future Power, Aliens!, Unicorns!, and Magicats! His most recent book is the critically-acclaimed novel The Man Who Melted, widely hailed as one of the most powerful and compelling novels of 1984. He is currently at work on a new novel, Counting Coup. Upcoming are two more anthologies co-edited with Gardner Dozois, Bestiary! and Mermaids!, both from Ace. His story “Blind Shemmy,” a Nebula finalist, was in our First Annual Edition.

  Stephen was trapped in the sweaty darkness and eagles were devouring him, tearing off pieces of flesh and flapping their wings, blasting him with waves of wet searing air.

  He woke up coughing, pushing his way out of the dream and into the secure and familiar darkness of his bedroom. His wife Helen stirred beside him, then turned over, pushing her rump against him. He looked over at the digital clock on the nightstand: it was five-thirty in the morning.

  He sat up in bed. He had a long drive ahead of him, and he was nervous about going. That was why he had slept fitfully during the night. It was a relief to be awake, to be going. The morning darkness made everything seem unreal now that he was sitting up in bed, already removed from the security of everything he knew and loved. He felt like a ghost in his own house.

  Who the hell would have thought that he, of all people, would be getting into this kind of stuff? Into religion, and Indian religion at that … as if his own wouldn’t do. Christ, being a Jew was hard enough. Well, he thought, if I hadn’t met John, then it probably would have been something else. He was looking for something … some kind of meaning, something that rang true. An authentic religious experience. He’d smoked the pipe with John, who rented the furnished room under Stephen’s real estate office, smoked it out of curiosity, or perhaps just to do something he could talk about. But when he smoked that pipe in the woods with John, he felt … something, something that breathed power and truth. It was as if Stephen could somehow feel everything the earth felt … he couldn’t verbalize it. He still couldn’t say if he really believed. But he was willing to believe.

  He smiled to himself. He was a realtor turned mystic.

  “Steve?” Helen mumbled, then, as if finding her voice, she said, “What are you doing up at this hour?”

  “I told you, I’m going with John to that guy’s vision-quest ceremony.”

  “Oh, Jesus … why don’t you just take us to the Temple? The kids would like that. It is Saturday.”

  “We’ve been over this a million times,” Stephen said. “I know how you feel, but this is something I want to do. Please try to understand. Think of it as a passing phase, male menopause, something like that.”

  She reached toward him, but he was too geared up to make love. His mind was on the ceremonies, on the vision-quest and the sweat-lodge. Some guy was going to sit naked on top of a hill without eating or drinking for four days … just to have a vision. Screaming for a vision, they called it. And he, Stephen, was going to sit in a sweat-lodge … if he could survive it.

  He wished he could just make love to Helen and make everything right. But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t turn himself on and off.

  She drew away from him; he knew she was hurt and angry. “First it was all that Zen-Buddhism business at the college,” she said, “and then that pseudo-Jungian philosopher, that self-styled guru, what was his name?”

  Stephen winced, and shook his head. “I don’t remember … .”

  “And then there was the Transcendental Meditation kick, and that goddamn EST, which you dragged me into. Christ, that was the worst. They wouldn’t even let you go to the bathroom during those stupid meetings. And now it’s something else. Do you really believe in all this Indian business?”

  “I don’t know what I believe in.”

  “And I don’t know why I converted … you don’t seem to want to have anything to do with your own religion.”

  “We did it for the family,” Stephen said lamely. Helen had always been a religious woman; she knew that God existed. Perhaps He’d made Himself known to her in the operating room, amidst all the cancer and broken bones and smashed skulls. She was an operating-room nurse. She had told him that it didn’t matter whether she was Christian or Jewish. God was God. But Stephen shouldn’t have asked her to convert. Now he had a responsibility to her which he couldn’t live up to. He was a hypocrite … and now Helen had nothing. She wasn’t comfortable in the synagogue without him; it was a foreign place to her.

  “I did it for you,” she said softly. She always looked the best to Stephen in the morning, her thick long black hair framing her childlike face. “I don’t know what you think you can find with those Indians. I think you’re getting into something dangerous. You’re not an Indian.”

  “Just bear with me a little bit longer,” Stephen said. “I feel I have to do this.” He kissed her and stood up. “Go back to sleep, I’ll be back tonight and we’ll talk about it.”

  “I’ll be here,” Helen said, yawning. She’d been on call all last night and had only slept for a few hours. “I do love you … I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for … .”

  John was waiting for him on the metal steps which led up to Stephen’s real estate office. He was wearing a woolen shirt over a torn white teeshirt, faded dungarees, worn boots, and a vest with lines of bright beads worked in geometrical patterns. He was in his early sixties, and he wore his coarse white hair long in the Indian fashion. His face was craggy and deeply-lined. That face looked as cracked and baked as the earth itself, as if it were some undecipherable roadmap of the man’s past. On his lap he held a soft white and blue rolled-up blanket. Inside the blanket, protected, was his ancient pipe and an eagle’s wing.

  The morning light was gray, and the air was still full of the night’s dampness.

&nb
sp; John stood up when he saw Stephen, but he paused, looking at the sky as if something was written there that he couldn’t read. Then he got into the car and said, “I stopped being wrong today.” Stephen looked perplexed. “You know,” John continued, and then he raised his hand to his mouth as if he were drinking from an invisible bottle. “Gonna lay off the booze. Gonna stay straight … I figure I owe it to Sam, the guy we’re going to see, to help him out with his ceremony.”

  Stephen got onto Route Seventeen easily; there was hardly any traffic at this time of the morning, especially on a Saturday. Those who were going to the Catskills for the week-end had already left last night or would be leaving later today. The light fog and slanting morning sunshine gave the mountains a dreamlike appearance, as if they’d been painted by Maxfield Parrish.

  John kept his window open, even though there was a chill in the air. The breeze made Stephen uncomfortable, but he didn’t say anything to John. John seemed to be looking for something, for he kept leaning forward to look upwards out of the windshield. “What are you looking for?” Stephen asked.

  “Eagles.”

  “What?” Stephen asked.

  “When I became a medicine man,” John explained, “I was given the gift of eagles.”

  “I didn’t know you were a medicine man.”

  “A sweat-lodge man can also be a medicine man … and vice versa. But I’m a good sweat-lodge man; that’s probably why Sam wants me to help him out with his sweat.”

  “You never talked about being a medicine man,” Stephen said. He wasn’t going to give John the chance to change the subject so easily.

  “I haven’t been a medicine man for a while. Booze and medicine don’t mix.”

  “What did you do when you were a medicine man?” Stephen asked.

  “Same things I do now, mostly … except for the drinking. I used to help people out.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Just help out.”

  “Like a doctor or a minister?”

  John laughed at that. “Maybe like both.”

  “What do the eagles have to do with it?” Stephen asked.

  “They’re my medicine.”

  “You’re talking in circles.”

  John chuckled, then said, “I always went on binges. My downfall was always the booze and the broads, but then I’d pray my ass off and try to be right again and sooner or later the eagles would come back, I’d look up and there’d always be one or two just circling around, way the hell up, and, man, those eagles would keep me on the straight path, keep me good, until I just couldn’t stand being right and I’d go and get messed up and leave all my responsibilities behind, and I’d lose the eagles again. I haven’t had them for a couple of years now, since I’ve been on the booze. And I’ve been paying for that, you’d better believe it. Now I’m right again, I think maybe they’ll come back.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Stephen said. “Are you telling me that wherever you go, there are eagles flying around … even in the city?”

  “I’ve seen them in the city … once. It was my first time in New York, and I was scared shitless of all those cars and concrete and people. One of the people I was with … we went to do some politics and ceremonies … pointed up to the sky, and sure as shit there was an eagle making a circle. I wasn’t afraid to be in that city anymore … I mean I was no more afraid than the next guy.”

  “No disrespect,” Stephen said, “but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “Maybe when we do the sweat … maybe one will fly into the sweat lodge and bite your pecker off,” John said. “Then would you believe?”

  Stephen laughed. “Yes, then I’d believe.”

  They reached the outskirts of Binghamton in the early afternoon. It was a clear sunny day, dry, with the softest touch of fall. Stephen turned onto a rough road flanked by white cement gas stations, and they drove uphill, over a bridge that overlooked an automobile graveyard, and followed the turns as the road narrowed.

  “I’ve been here before,” John said, “so I’ll remember the house.”

  “Is it your friend’s house?” Stephen asked.

  “Sam’s parents own it. It’s a farm, and Sam is sort of living there now.”

  “How do you come to know him?”

  “Sam came to learn some things from me when I was living in South Dakota,” John said. “He was hoping to become a medicine man.”

  “Is he?”

  “Never quite came around that way. Like most of us, he got sidetracked. Fell in with some kinds of people.”

  “What do you mean?” Stephen asked, slowing down for a turn. There were trees thick on both sides of the road. This was good country, gnarly and wild, and, although close to the city, thinly populated.

  “He got medicine things mixed up with human things,” John said. “All the people he was with were blaming everything on bad medicine instead of on themselves. When anything had happened, they thought that somebody had done something to them.”

  “What do you mean?” Stephen asked nervously, remembering what Helen had said to him this morning … that they were dangerous. Maybe he was getting in over his head.

  “They blamed everything on sorcery.”

  “Sorcery? Do you believe in that?” Stephen was a non-believer, but just the idea that magic could be real, that there was more than just getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, excited him.

  “Sorcery’s real,” John said flatly, quietly. “Medicine is just there, it can be used in good ways or bad ways. But I think that Sam just got himself messed up. He came out west for a sun dance, and stayed with me for almost a year. He started to become a pretty good sweat-lodge man, but he wanted to go too fast, he wasn’t ready to be a healer, and I thought he should work and learn from someone younger for a while. So I sent him to Virginia, where a Sioux guy I know lives … Joseph Whiteshirt. He’s a young medicine man with a good talent. Anyway, Sam needed to study in a different place. Different places have different medicine, different powers. Well … he ended up screwing the guy’s wife and almost got himself a knife in the belly for that. Was a lot of bad blood between Sam and Whiteshirt … maybe some bad medicine, too. Anyway, Whiteshirt blamed me for what happened with Sam and his wife. He thought I put Sam up to it or something. Everybody got sick … I guess I was responsible. When they needed help, I was drinking and didn’t have any power to help anybody, including myself. But that’s no excuse … .”

  “So where’s this Whiteshirt now?” Stephen asked. Christ, he was getting into something over his head.

  “He’s at Sam’s … so is his wife, they got back together.”

  “What?”

  “There’s still a lot of bad blood,” John said, “but Whiteshirt has to help Sam out on his vision-quest whether he likes Sam or not … if he’s a real medicine man. Maybe doing some ceremonies together will help them all out.”

  “What about you?” Stephen asked. He was nervous about this whole thing now, but he couldn’t back out. He knew it was foolish, but it was a matter of male pride. Helen would have laughed at the idea of him still being macho, here in the quiche-eating eighties, but there it was.

  “Maybe it’ll help me out, too,” John said, smiling faintly. “But then again maybe the ceremonies won’t change Sam and Whiteshirt and the other people mixed up in this, maybe their hearts will stay hard. You sure you still want to go along? If you’re nervous, you can drop me at the house. I’ll get back. No trouble.

  “I came to do a sweat and I’m going to do it,” Stephen said.

  John laughed. “Don’t worry, I won’t let you die in there … . You’d better start slowing down now,” he said as Stephen came to another sharp curve in the road.

  On Stephen’s side of the car were hayfields stretching back to smooth, fir-covered hills. The fields were still green, but beginning to brown. An old cannibalized mowing machine was rusting in the middle of one of the fields. On the other side of the road, on John’s side, were a few m
odern, expensive houses owned by executives who worked in town, but they were outnumbered by farms and the everpresent country shacks, their front yards littered with old car hulks and ancient appliances, their porches filled with mildewed mattresses and torn couches and broken cabinets.

  “There’s the house,” John said, pointing. It was red clapboard, set about fifty feet from the road. Behind it on higher ground was a dilapidated red barn and several storage sheds. The sheds were unpainted, and one was caving in.

  Stephen pulled into the driveway, behind a green Ford truck, which had a poster in the rear-view window proclaiming that it was an Official Indian Car. On the back of the truck was painted AKWESASNE in large block letters.

  “What does that mean?” Stephen asked.

  “It’s a Mohawk reservation, not far from here,” John said. “It got invaded, you might say, by white folk … poachers, and the Indian people had it out with the state police. Sam was there, so was Whiteshirt. But there ain’t no more poachers.”

  “What about you?” Stephen asked.

  “I was home getting blind.” Then, after a beat, John said. “There might be people here who are really against me … do you still want to come?”

  “Christ, I’m already here.” Stephen hoped he would not regret it.

  “Anyway, you don’t believe in any of that superstitious nonsense like we were talking about, do you?” John asked, grinning, his demeanor suddenly changed, as if he had just put on a mask, or taken one off.

  “You’re crazy,” Stephen said. Yet he felt a chill run down the back of his neck … or perhaps it was just sweat.

  They crossed the road and cut across a field, passing the rusting mowing machine. On the western edge of the field was woodland. They walked through the woods, which opened up into a clearing. A man in his late twenties with jet-black shoulder-length hair waved at them as they approached.

  Stephen knew it was too late to turn back now.