Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Towards the inner base of the Peninsula the ridges flatten down into a hot, sandy country, not lived in by human people, which runs two full days’ walk to the southwest coasts of the Inland Sea. The beaches are broad and low, with seamarshes and dunes and brackish, boggy lakes inland for miles; farther south, steep, desolate mountains run between east and west. The Inland Sea along that coast is very shallow, crowded with sandbars and islands, and on those islands is where they grow the cotton.

  The cotton people call themselves Usudegd. There are a lot of them, some thousands, living on the islands and at places on the coast where rivers come down from the mountains—they have salt water everywhere, but not much fresh. The sea is warm there, and it’s warm country, though nothing like so hot, they say, as across those desolate mountains on the shores of the Omorn Sea. There are some severely poisoned areas in their country, but since it’s so dry the stuff stays put in the ground, and they know where not to go.

  Across the Inland Sea in the northeast the cotton people look up to the tallest peak of the Range of Light, which we call South Mountain and they call Old Lion Mountain. Usually all one can see is the murk from the volcanoes south of it. It is important in their thoughts, but they never go to it. They say it is sacred, and its paths are not to be walked. But what about the Gongon people, who live all around South Mountain? That sort of idea is typical of the cotton people. They are not reasonable about some things.

  It is my opinion that people who have too much to do with the sea, and use boats a great deal, have their minds affected by it.

  At any rate, their towns are different from the towns of the Peninsular peoples. The cotton people dig in and build underground, with only a couple of feet of wall aboveground for windows, like a heyimas. The roof is a low dome covered with sod, so from any distance you don’t see a town, but a patch of hummocks. In among the roofs are all kinds of shrubs, trees, and vines they have down there; palm, avocado, big orange and lemon and grapefruit trees, carob and date, the same kinds of eucalyptus we have, and some I never saw before, are some of their trees. The vines flower splendidly. The trees make shade aboveground and the houses stay cool underground; the arrangement looks odd, but is reasonable. They have no problems draining their houses, as we do our heyimas, because it’s so dry there; though when it rains sometimes it rains hard, and they get flooded out, they said.

  Their sacred places are some distance outside the towns, and are artificial mountains, hillocks with ritual paths round and round them, and beautiful small buildings or enclosures on top. We didn’t mess with any of that. Patience said it was best to keep clear out of foreigners’ sacred places until invited into them. He said one reason he liked the Amaranth people, with whom he had stayed several times, was that they had no sacred places at all. People tend to get testy about those places.

  But the cotton people were already testy. Although they hadn’t replied or sent any message on the Exchange, they were angry that we had sent back their woven goods and hadn’t sent the usual amount of wine, and right away we were in trouble there. All we had to do was say we had come from the Valley of the Na and the hornets began to buzz.

  We had to get into one of their boats, flat things that felt very unsafe, and go out to the most important island. As soon as we got on the water, though it was entirely calm and smooth, I got sick again. I have a very delicate sense of balance and the unsteadiness of boats affects my inner ear. The cotton people had no understanding of this at all. The Falares Islanders had made jokes about it, but the cotton people were contemptuous and rude.

  We passed many large islands, and the cotton people kept pointing and saying, “Cotton, cotton. See the cotton? Everybody knows we grow the best cotton. People as far north as Crater Lake know it! Look at that cotton,” and so on. The cotton fields were not very impressive at that time of year, but we nodded and smiled and behaved with admiration and propriety, agreeing with everything they said.

  After coasting a flat island miles long we turned northeast and landed on a small island with a good view of the mountains, all the south end of the Range of Light and the bare, raw Havil Range in the south. The whole island was a town, hundreds of hummock roofs, some of them turfed, others naked sand, and trees and bushes in patterns among the hummocks, and flowerbeds, also in patterns, with little paths between and through. They are strong on paths, down there, but you have to know which ones are to be walked on.

  We had been travelling all that day and thirty days before it, and it was sunset by the time we landed on this island, but they hardly stopped to give us dinner before they took us straight into the town council meeting. And there they hardly said anything polite or appropriate about our having come all that way to talk with them before they started saying, “Where’s the Sweet Betebbes?” and, “Why did you send our goods back? Do we not have an agreement, made sixty years ago? Every year since then it had been honored and renewed, until this year! Why have you of the Wally broken your word?” They spoke good TOK, but they always said Wally for Valley, and whine for wine.

  Patience knew what he was doing when he took his middle name. He listened to them endlessly and remained alert, yet never frowned, or nodded, or shook his head. Peregrine, Gold, and I imitated him as well as we could.

  After a great many of them had said their say, a little woman stood up, and a little man beside her. They both had twisted bodies and humped backs, and looked both young and old. One of them said, “Let our guests have a word now,” and the other said, “Let the Whine People speak.” They had authority, those little twins. The others all shut up like clams.

  Patience let there be silence for some while before he spoke, and when he spoke his voice was grave and soft, so that they had to stay quiet to hear what he said. He was cautious and polite. He said a lot about the fitness of the agreement and its admirable age and convenience, and the unsurpassed quality of Usudegd cotton, known to be the best cotton from Crater Lake to the Omorn Break, from the Ocean Coast to the Range of Heaven—he got fairly eloquent in here—and then he quieted down again and spoke a little sadly about how Time blunts the keenest knife and changes the meaning of words and the thoughts in human minds, so that finally the firmest knot must be re-tied, and the sincerest word spoken once again. And then he sat down.

  There was a silence. I thought he had awakened reason in them and they would agree at once. I was very young. The same woman who had talked the most before got up and said, “Why didn’t you send forty barrels of Sweet Betebbes wine like always before?”

  I saw that the difficult part was only beginning. Patience had to answer that question and also say why we had sent back their woven goods. For a long time he didn’t. He kept talking in metaphors and images, and skirting around the issues; and after a while the little twisty twins began answering him the same way. And then, before anything that meant much had been said, it was so late that they called the meeting off for the night, and finally took us to an empty house where we could get some sleep. There was no heating, and one tiny electric light. The beds stood up on legs, and were lumpy.

  It went on like that for three more days. Even Patience said he hadn’t expected them to go on arguing, and that probably the reason they argued so much was that they were ashamed of something. If so, it was our part not to shame them further. So we could not say anything about the poor quality of the raw cotton for the last several years, or even about the sleazy they had tried to foist off on us. We just stayed calm and sad and said that indeed we regretted not shipping the sweet wine which we grew especially for them, but said nothing about why we had not shipped it. And sure enough, little by little it came out that they had had a lot of bad things happen in the last five years: a cottonleaf virus mutation that was hard to control, and three years of drought, and a set of unusually severe earthquakes that had drowned some of their islands and left the water on others brackish or saline. All these things they seemed to consider their own fault, things to be ashamed of. “We have walked in the wr
ong paths!” they kept saying.

  Patience, and Peregrine who also spoke for us, never said anything about these troubles of theirs, but began talking about troubles we had had in the Valley. They had to exaggerate a good deal, because things had been going particularly well for the winemakers, and the fourth and fifth years before had been great vintages of both Ganais and Fetuli; but in any kind of farming there are always troubles enough to talk about. And the more they told or invented about unseasonable frosts and unsuccessful fermentations, the more the cotton people went on about their own troubles, until they had told everything. They seemed relieved, then, and they gave us a much nicer house to stay in, well lighted and warm, with little paths all over the roof marked out with white shells and fumo balls. And at last they began to renegotiate the contract. It had taken Patience seven days to get them to do that. When we got down to it at last, it was very simple. The terms were about the same as they had been, with more room for negotiation each year through the Exchange. Nothing was said about why they hadn’t used the Exchange to explain their behavior earlier. They were still touchy and unreasonable if you said the wrong thing. We said that we would accept short-staple cotton until they had the long staple in quantity again, and we would send a double quantity of Sweet Betebbes with the spring shipment; however, underweight bales would be refused, and we did not want woven goods, since we preferred to make our own. There was trouble on this point. The women with the thirst for Sweet Betebbes got poisonous about it, and went on for hours about the quality and beauty of the fabrics of Usudegd. But by now Patience and the little twisty twins were friends of the heart; and the contract at last was spoken for cotton in the bale only, no fabrics.

  After speaking the contract we stayed on nine days more, for politeness, and because Patience and the twins were drinking together. Gold was busy with his maps and notes, and Peregrine, a person whom everybody everywhere liked, was always talking with townspeople or going off in boats with them to other islands. The boats were little better than bundles of tule reeds. I generally hung around with some young women who were weavers there. They had some fine mechanical looms, solar powered, that I made notes on for my teacher Soaring, and also they were kind and friendly. Patience warned me that it’s better not to have a relation of sex with people in foreign countries until you know a good deal about their customs and expectations concerning commitment, marriage, contraception, techniques, and so on. So I just flirted and did some kissing. The cotton women kissed with their mouths wide open, which is surprising if you aren’t expecting it, and disagreeably wet, but very voluptuous; which was trying, under the circumstances.

  Peregrine came back from another island one day with a queer expression. He said, “We’ve been fooled, Patience!”

  Patience just waited, as usual.

  Peregrine explained: he had met, in a town on one of the northernmost islands, some of the sailors of the ships that had brought the cotton to Sed and taken our wine back—the same people who had explained that they were just sailors and knew nothing about the cotton people and didn’t even speak their language. There they were living in that cotton town and speaking the language like natives, which they were. They were sailors by art or trade, and hadn’t wanted to get into trouble with us by arguing about the sleazy goods or the contract. They hadn’t told anybody except the people on their own island about their private supply of Sweet Betebbes, either. They laughed like crazy about it when they met him, Peregrine said. They told him that the man they had told us was one of the cotton people was the only one that wasn’t—he was a poor halfwit who had wandered in from the desert, and couldn’t speak much of any language.

  Patience was silent long enough that I believed he was angry, but then he began to laugh, and we all laughed. He said, “Go see if that crew will take us back north by sea!”

  But I suggested that we go home by land.

  We left a few days later. It took us two months to go along the eastern coast of the Inland Sea to Rekwit, from which we sailed across to Tatselots in a great storm, but all that journey is another story, which I may tell later.

  Since we went down there, there hasn’t been any more trouble with the cotton people, and they have always sent us good, long-staple cotton. They are not an unreasonable people, except in making little paths everywhere and being ashamed to admit they have had troubles.

  LEWIS SHINER

  Twilight Time

  In recent years, there has been a wave of nostalgia for the fifties and early sixties, fueled mostly by movies like American Graffiti, Grease, The Buddy Holly Story, Porky’s, and a score of others, and bv TV shows like Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. But these nostalgia-trips seldom dwell on the darker side of that era: McCarthyism, cold war paranoia, Monster Movies, horror comics, and that curious Flying Saucer mania that could sweep through small towns with the force of a religious conversion.

  Here Lewis Shiner takes an unflinching look at just those very things, and then takes us along on a journey to a past that might not be quite the way you remember it—with good reason.

  Lewis Shiner is widely regarded as one of the most exciting new SF writers of the eighties. His stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, Oui, Shayol, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Twilight Zone Magazine, and elsewhere. His first novel, Frontera, appeared in 1984, to good critical response. He served on the 1984 Nebula Award Jury, and is also a member (along with Howard Waldrop, Bruce Sterling, Leigh Kennedy, and others) of the well-known Turkey City Writers Workshop. Shiner lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife Edith.

  I

  The part of the machine they strapped me to looked too much like an electric chair. A sudden, violent urge to resist came over me as the two proctors buckled me down and fastened the electrodes to my scalp.

  Not that it would have done me much good. The machine and I were in a steel cage and the cage was in the middle of a maximum security prison.

  “Okay?” Thornberg asked me. His thinning hair was damp with sweat and a patch of it glistened on his forehead.

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  He turned some switches. I couldn’t hear anything happen, but then, this wasn’t I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and sparks weren’t supposed to be climbing the bars of the cage.

  Then a jolt of power hit me and I couldn’t even open my mouth to tell Thornberg to cut the thing off. My eyes filmed over and I started to see images in the mist. A distant, calmer part of my brain realized that Thornberg had cut in the encephalograph tapes.

  We’d been working on them for weeks, refining the images detail by detail, and now all the pieces came together. Not just the steep hills and narrow streets of the town, not just the gym and the crepe-paper streamers and Buddy Holly singing, but the whole era, the flying saucer movies, the cars like rocket ships, rolled-up blue jeans and flannel shirts and PF Flyer tennis shoes, yo-yos, the candy wagon at noon recess, William Lundigan and Tom Corbett and Johnny Horton. They all melted together, the world events and the TV shows, the facts and the fiction and the imaginings, and for just one second they made a coherent, tangible universe.

  And then I kicked and threw out my arms because I was falling.

  II

  I fell the way I did in dreams, trying to jerk myself awake, but the fall went on and on. I opened my eyes and saw a quiet blue, as if the sky had turned to water and I was drifting down through it. I hit on my hands and knees and felt the dirt under my fingers turn hard and grainy, felt the sun burn into my back.

  Off to the left sat a line of low, gray-green hills. The ground where I crouched was covered with tough bull-head weeds and the sky overhead was the clear, hot blue of an Arizona summer.

  The San Carlos Mountains, I thought. He did it. I’m back.

  From the angle of the sun it looked to be late afternoon. I’d landed outside the city, as planned, to avoid materializing inside a crowd or a solid wall.

  I sucked the good clean air into my lun
gs and danced a couple of steps across the sand. All I wanted was to get into town and make sure the rest of it was there, that it was all really happening.

  I found the highway a few hundred yards to the south. LeeAnn was a tight feeling in my chest as I headed for town at a fast walk.

  My eyes were so full of the mountains and the open sky that I didn’t notice the thing in the road until I was almost on top of it.

  The pavement was not just broken, but scarred, but by a huge, melted trench. Something had boiled the asphalt up in two knee-high waves and left it frozen in mid-air. The sand around it looked like a giant tire track in icy mud, a jagged surface of glassy whites and browns.

  The strangest part was that for a couple of seconds I didn’t realize that anything was wrong. My memories had become such a hash that the San Carlos Reservation had turned into a desert from a Sunday afternoon Science Fiction Theater and any minute I expected to see Caltiki or a giant scorpion come over the nearest rise.

  I knelt to touch the asphalt ridge. Nothing in the real 1961, the one in the history books, could do this to a road.

  A distant rumbling made me look up. A truck was coming out of the east, and it was swollen with all the outlandish bumps and curves of the middle fifties. I jogged toward it, waving one arm, and it pulled up beside me.

  The driver was an aging Apache in faded jeans and a T-shirt. “Ya-ta-hey, friend,” he said. “Goin’ in to Globe?”

  “Yeah,” I said, out of breath. “But I need to tell you. The road’s … torn up, just ahead.”

  “Got the road again, did they? Damn gover’ment. Always got to do their tests on Indian land. You want a lift?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “Yeah, I do. Thanks.”

  I got in and he threw the truck in gear with a sound like a bag of cans rolling downhill. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen a gearshift on the steering column.