The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Sixth Annual

by Gardner Dozois

  Although alien thoughts are beyond us, alien actions may be easy to grasp. We can understand the “what” if not the “why.” If we saw what happened inside the alien vessel, we would recognize that the crew tried to take the captain’s ray-gun and kill him.

  There was a fight. The ray-gun went off many times. The starship exploded.

  All this happened many centuries ago, before telescopes. The people of Earth still wore animal skins. They only knew Jupiter as a dot in the sky. When the starship exploded, the dot got a tiny bit brighter, then returned to normal. No one on Earth noticed—not even the shamans who thought dots in the sky were important.

  The ray-gun survived the explosion. A ray-gun must be resilient, or else it is not a ray-gun. The explosion hurled the ray-gun away from Jupiter and out into open space.

  After thousands of years, the ray-gun reached Earth. It fell from the sky like a meteor; it grew hot enough to glow, but it didn’t burn up.

  The ray-gun fell at night during a blizzard. Traveling thousands of miles an hour, the ray-gun plunged deep into snow-covered woods. The snow melted so quickly that it burst into steam.

  The blizzard continued, unaffected. Some things can’t be harmed, even by ray-guns.

  Unthinking snowflakes drifted down. If they touched the ray-gun’s surface they vaporized, stealing heat from the weapon. Heat also radiated outward, melting snow nearby on the ground. Melt-water flowed into the shallow crater made by the raygun’s impact. Water and snow cooled the weapon until all excess temperature had dissipated. A million more snowflakes heaped over the crater, hiding the ray-gun till spring.

  In March, the gun was found by a boy named Jack. He was fourteen years old and walking through the woods after school. He walked slowly, brooding about his lack of popularity. Jack despised popular students and had no interest in anything they did. Even so, he envied them. They didn’t appear to be lonely.

  Jack wished he had a girlfriend. He wished he were important. He wished he knew what to do with his life. Instead, he walked alone in the woods on the edge of town.

  The woods were not wild or isolated. They were crisscrossed with trails made by children playing hide-and-seek. But in spring, the trails were muddy; most people stayed away. Jack soon worried more about how to avoid shoe-sucking mud than about the unfairness of the world. He took wide detours around mucky patches, thrashing through brush that was crisp from winter.

  Stalks broke as he passed. Burrs stuck to his jacket. He got farther and farther from the usual paths, hoping he’d find a way out by blundering forward rather than swallowing his pride and retreating.

  In this way, Jack reached the spot where the ray-gun had landed. He saw the crater it had made. He found the ray-gun itself.

  The gun seized Jack’s attention, but he didn’t know what it was. Its design was too alien to be recognized as a weapon. Its metal was blackened but not black, as if it had once been another color but had finished that phase of its existence. Its pistol-butt was bulbous, the size of a tennis ball. Its barrel, as long as Jack’s hand, was straight but its surface had dozens of nubs like a briarwood cane. The gun’s trigger was a protruding blister you squeezed till it popped. A hard metal cap could slide over the blister to prevent the gun from firing accidentally, but the safety was off; it had been off for centuries, ever since the fight on the starship.

  The alien captain who once owned the weapon might have considered it beautiful, but to human eyes, the gun resembled a dirty wet stick with a lump on one end. Jack might have walked by without giving it a second look if it hadn’t been lying in a scorched crater. But it was.

  The crater was two paces across and barren of plant life. The vegetation had burned in the heat of the ray-gun’s fall. Soon enough, new spring growth would sprout, making the crater less obvious. At present though, the ray-gun stood out on the charred earth like a snake in an empty birdbath.

  Jack picked up the gun. Though it looked like briarwood, it was cold like metal. It felt solid: not heavy, but substantial. It had the heft of a well-made object. Jack turned the gun in his hands, examining it from every angle. When he looked down the muzzle, he saw a crystal lens cut into hundreds of facets. Jack poked it with his baby-finger, thinking the lens was a piece of glass that someone had jammed inside. He had the idea this might be a toy—perhaps a squirt-gun dropped by a careless child. If so, it had to be the most expensive toy Jack had ever seen. The gun’s barrel and its lens were so perfectly machined that no one could mistake the craftsman-ship.

  Jack continued to poke at the weapon until the inevitable happened: he pressed the trigger blister. The ray-gun went off.

  It might have been fatal, but by chance Jack was holding the gun aimed away from himself. A ray shot out of the gun’s muzzle and blasted through a maple tree ten paces away. The ray made no sound, and although Jack had seen it clearly, he couldn’t say what the ray’s color had been. It had no color; it was simply a presence, like wind-chill or gravity. Yet Jack was sure he’d seen a force emanate from the muzzle and strike the tree.

  Though the ray can’t be described, its effect was plain. A circular hole appeared in the maple tree’s trunk where bark and wood disintegrated into sizzling plasma. The plasma expanded at high speed and pressure, blowing apart what remained of the surrounding trunk. The ray made no sound, but the explosion did. Shocked chunks of wood and boiling maple sap flew outward, obliterating a cross-section of the tree. The lower part of the trunk and the roots were still there; so were the upper part and branches. In between was a gap, filled with hot escaping gases.

  The unsupported part of the maple fell. It toppled ponderously backwards. The maple crashed onto the trees behind, its winter-bare branches snagging theirs. To Jack, it seemed that the forest had stopped the maple’s fall, like soldiers catching an injured companion before he hit the ground.

  Jack still held the gun. He gazed at it in wonder. His mind couldn’t grasp what had happened.

  He didn’t drop the gun in fear. He didn’t try to fire it again. He simply stared.

  It was a ray-gun. It would never be anything else.

  Jack wondered where the weapon had come from. Had aliens visited these woods? Or was the gun created by a secret government project? Did the gun’s owner want it back? Was he, she or it searching the woods right now?

  Jack was tempted to put the gun back into the crater, then run before the owner showed up. But was there really an owner nearby? The crater suggested that the gun had fallen from space. Jack had seen photos of meteor impact craters; this wasn’t exactly the same, but it had a similar look.

  Jack turned his eyes upward. He saw a mundane after-school sky. It had no UFOs. Jack felt embarrassed for even looking.

  He examined the crater again. If Jack left the gun here, and the owner never retrieved it, sooner or later the weapon would be found by someone else—probably by children playing in the woods. They might shoot each other by accident. If this were an ordinary gun, Jack would never leave it lying in a place like this. He’d take the gun home, tell his parents, and they’d turn it over to the police.

  Should he do the same for this gun? No. He didn’t want to.

  But he didn’t know what he wanted to do instead. Questions buzzed through his mind, starting with, “What should I do?” then moving on to, “Am I in danger?” and, “Do aliens really exist?”

  After a while, he found himself wondering, “Exactly how much can the gun blow up?” That question made him smile.

  Jack decided he wouldn’t tell anyone about the gun—not now and maybe not ever. He would take it home and hide it where it wouldn’t be found, but where it would be available if trouble came. What kind of trouble? Aliens . . . spies . . . supervillains . . . who knew? If ray-guns were real, was anything impossible?

  On the walk back home, Jack was so distracted by “What ifs?” that he nearly got hit by a car. He had reached the road that separated the woods from neighboring houses. Like most roads in that part of Jack’s small town, it
didn’t get much traffic. Jack stepped out from the trees and suddenly a sports-car whizzed past him, only two steps away. Jack staggered back; the driver leaned on the horn; Jack hit his shoulder on an oak tree; then the incident was over, except for belated adrenaline.

  For a full minute afterward, Jack leaned against the oak and felt his heart pound. As close calls go, this one wasn’t too bad: Jack hadn’t really been near enough to the road to get hit. Still, Jack needed quite a while to calm down. How stupid would it be to die in an accident on the day he’d found something miraculous?

  Jack ought to have been watching for trouble. What if the threat had been a bugeyed monster instead of a car? Jack should have been alert and prepared. In his mind’s eye he imagined the incident again, only this time he casually somersaulted to safety rather than stumbling into a tree. That’s how you’re supposed to cheat death if you’re carrying a ray-gun: with cool heroic flair.

  But Jack couldn’t do somersaults. He said to himself, I’m Peter Parker, not Spider-Man.

  On the other hand, Jack had just acquired great power. And great responsibility. Like Peter Parker, Jack had to keep his power secret, for fear of tragic consequences. In Jack’s case, maybe aliens would come for him. Maybe spies or government agents would kidnap him and his family. No matter how farfetched those things seemed, the existence of a ray-gun proved the world wasn’t tame.

  That night, Jack debated what to do with the gun. He pictured himself shooting terrorists and gang lords. If he rid the world of scum, pretty girls might admire him. But as soon as Jack imagined himself storming into a terrorist stronghold, he realized he’d get killed almost immediately. The ray-gun provided awesome firepower, but no defense at all. Besides if Jack had found an ordinary gun in the forest, he never would have dreamed of running around murdering bad guys. Why should a ray-gun be different?

  But it was different. Jack couldn’t put the difference into words, but it was as real as the weapon’s solid weight in his hands. The ray-gun changed everything. A world that contained a ray-gun might also contain flying saucers, beautiful secret agents . . . and heroes.

  Heroes who could somersault away from oncoming sports-cars. Heroes who would cope with any danger. Heroes who deserved to have a ray-gun.

  When he was young, Jack had taken for granted he’d become a hero: brave, skilled and important. Somehow he’d lost that belief. He’d let himself settle for being ordinary. But now he wasn’t ordinary: he had a ray-gun.

  He had to live up to it. Jack had to be ready for bug-eyed monsters and giant robots. These were no longer childish daydreams; they were real possibilities in a world where ray-guns existed. Jack could picture himself running through town, blasting aliens and saving the planet.

  Such thoughts made sense when Jack held the ray-gun in his hands—as if the gun planted fantasies in his mind. The feel of the gun filled Jack with ambition.

  All weapons have a sense of purpose.

  Jack practiced with the gun as often as he could. To avoid being seen, he rode his bike to a tract of land in the country: twenty acres owned by Jack’s Great-Uncle Ron. No one went there but Jack. Uncle Ron had once intended to build a house on the property, but that had never happened. Now Ron was in a nursing home. Jack’s family intended to sell the land once the old man died, but Ron was healthy for someone in his nineties. Until Uncle Ron’s health ran out, Jack had the place to himself.

  The tract was undeveloped—raw forest, not a woods where children played. In the middle lay a pond, completely hidden by trees. Jack would float sticks in the pond and shoot them with the gun.

  If he missed, the water boiled. If he didn’t, the sticks were destroyed. Sometimes they erupted in fire. Sometimes they burst with a bang but no flame. Sometimes they simply vanished. Jack couldn’t tell if he was doing something subtly different to get each effect, or if the ray-gun changed modes on its own. Perhaps it had a computer which analyzed the target and chose the most lethal attack. Perhaps the attacks were always the same, but differences in the sticks made for different results. Jack didn’t know. But as spring led to summer, he became a better shot. By autumn, he’d begun throwing sticks into the air and trying to vaporize them before they reached the ground.

  During this time, Jack grew stronger. Long bike rides to the pond helped his legs and his stamina. In addition, he exercised with fitness equipment his parents had bought but never used. If monsters ever came, Jack couldn’t afford to be weak—heroes had to climb fences and break down doors. They had to balance on rooftops and hang by their fingers from cliffs. They had to run fast enough to save the girl.

  Jack pumped iron and ran every day. As he did so, he imagined dodging bullets and tentacles. When he felt like giving up, he cradled the ray-gun in his hands. It gave him the strength to persevere.

  Before the ray-gun, Jack had seen himself as just another teenager; his life didn’t make sense. But the gun made Jack a hero who might be needed to save the Earth. It clarified everything. Sore muscles didn’t matter. Watching TV was a waste. If you let down your guard, that’s when the monsters came.

  When he wasn’t exercising, Jack studied science. That was another part of being a hero. He sometimes dreamed he’d analyze the ray-gun, discovering how it worked and giving humans amazing new technology. At other times, he didn’t want to understand the gun at all. He liked its mystery. Besides, there was no guarantee Jack would ever understand how the gun worked. Perhaps human science wouldn’t progress far enough in Jack’s lifetime. Perhaps Jack himself wouldn’t have the brains to figure it out.

  But he had enough brains for high school. He did well; he was motivated. He had to hold back to avoid attracting attention. When his gym teacher told him he should go out for track, Jack ran slower and pretended to get out of breath.

  Spider-Man had to do the same.

  Two years later, in geography class, a girl named Kirsten gave Jack a daisy. She said the daisy was good luck and he should make a wish.

  Even a sixteen-year-old boy couldn’t misconstrue such a hint. Despite awkwardness and foot-dragging, Jack soon had a girlfriend.

  Kirsten was quiet but pretty. She played guitar. She wrote poems. She’d never had a boyfriend but she knew how to kiss. These were all good things. Jack wondered if he should tell her about the ray-gun.

  Until Kirsten, Jack’s only knowledge of girls came from his big sister, Rachel. Rachel was seventeen and incapable of keeping a secret. She talked with her friends about everything and was too slapdash to hide private things well. Jack didn’t snoop through his sister’s possessions, but when Rachel left her bedroom door ajar with empty cigarette packs tumbling out of the garbage can, who wouldn’t notice? When she gossiped on the phone about sex with her boyfriend, who couldn’t overhear? Jack didn’t want to listen, but Rachel never lowered her voice. The things Jack heard made him queasy—about his sister, and girls in general.

  If he showed Kirsten the ray-gun, would she tell her friends? Jack wanted to believe she wasn’t that kind of girl, but he didn’t know how many kinds of girl there were. He just knew that the ray-gun was too important for him to take chances. Changing the status quo wasn’t worth the risk.

  Yet the status quo changed anyway. The more time Jack spent with Kirsten, the less he had for shooting practice and other aspects of hero-dom. He felt guilty for skimping on crisis preparation; but when he went to the pond or spent a night reading science, he felt guilty for skimping on Kirsten. Jack would tell her he couldn’t come over to do homework and when she asked why, he’d have to make up excuses. He felt he was treating her like an enemy spy: holding her at arm’s length as if she were some femme fatale who was tempting him to betray state secrets. He hated not trusting her.

  Despite this wall between them, Kirsten became Jack’s lens on the world. If anything interesting happened, Jack didn’t experience it directly; some portion of his mind stood back, enjoying the anticipation of having something to tell Kirsten about the next time they met. Whatever he saw, he want
ed her to see it too. Whenever Jack heard a joke, even before he started laughing, he pictured himself repeating it to Kirsten.

  Inevitably, Jack asked himself what she’d think of his hero-dom. Would she be impressed? Would she throw her arms around him and say he was even more wonderful than she’d thought? Or would she get that look on her face, the one when she heard bad poetry? Would she think he was an immature geek who’d read too many comic books and was pursuing some juvenile fantasy? How could anyone believe hostile aliens might appear in the sky? And if aliens did show up, how delusional was it that a teenage boy might make a difference, even if he owned a ray-gun and could do a hundred push-ups without stopping?

  For weeks, Jack agonized: to tell or not to tell. Was Kirsten worthy, or just a copy of Jack’s sister? Was Jack himself worthy, or just a foolish boy?

  One Saturday in May, Jack and Kirsten went biking. Jack led her to the pond where he practiced with the gun. He hadn’t yet decided what he’d do when they got there, but Jack couldn’t just tell Kirsten about the ray-gun. She’d never believe it was real unless she saw the rays in action. But so much could go wrong. Jack was terrified of giving away his deepest secret. He was afraid that when he saw hero-dom through Kirsten’s eyes, he’d realize it was silly.

  At the pond, Jack felt so nervous he could hardly speak. He babbled about the warm weather . . . a patch of mushrooms . . . a crow cawing in a tree. He talked about everything except what was on his mind.

  Kirsten misinterpreted his anxiety. She thought she knew why Jack had brought her to this secluded spot. After a while, she decided he needed encouragement, so she took off her shirt and her bra.