The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Wallace Jr. isn’t fidgety like a lot of kids. I found it pleasant to sit and stare into the fire. I took a little piece of Mother’s Red Man, though I don’t generally chew. It was no different from visiting her at the Home, only more interesting, because of the bears. There were about eight or ten of them. Inside the fire itself, things weren’t so dull, either: little dramas were being played out as fiery chambers were created and then destroyed in a crashing of sparks. My imagination ran wild. I looked around the circle at the bears and wondered what they saw. Some had their eyes closed. Though they were gathered together, their spirits still seemed solitary, as if each bear was sitting alone in front of its own fire.

  The hubcap came around and we all took some newberries. I don’t know about Mother, but I just pretended to eat mine. Wallace Jr. made a face and spit his out. When he went to sleep, I wrapped the bedspread around all three of us. It was getting colder and we were not provided, like the bears, with fur. I was ready to go home, but not Mother. She pointed up toward the canopy of trees, where a light was spreading, and then pointed to herself. Did she think it was angels approaching from on high? It was only the high beams of some southbound truck, but she seemed mighty pleased. Holding her hand, I felt it grow colder and colder in mine.

  * * *

  Wallace Jr. woke me up by tapping on my knee. It was past dawn, and his grandmother had died sitting on the log between us. The fire was banked up and the bears were gone and someone was crashing straight through the woods, ignoring the path. It was Wallace. Two state troopers were right behind him. He was wearing a white shirt, and I realized it was Sunday morning. Underneath his sadness on learning of Mother’s death, he looked peeved.

  The troopers were sniffing the air and nodding. The bear smell was still strong. Wallace and I wrapped Mother in the bedspread and started with her body back out to the highway. The troopers stayed behind and scattered the bears’ fire ashes and flung their firewood away into the bushes. It seemed a petty thing to do. They were like bears themselves, each one solitary in his own uniform.

  There was Wallace’s Olds 98 on the median, with its radial tires looking squashed on the grass. In front of it there was a police car with a trooper standing beside it, and behind it a funeral home hearse, also an Olds 98.

  “First report we’ve had of them bothering old folks,” the trooper said to Wallace. “That’s not hardly what happened at all,” I said, but nobody asked me to explain. They have their own procedures. Two men in suits got out of the hearse and opened the rear door. That to me was the point at which Mother departed this life. After we put her in, I put my arms around the boy. He was shivering even though it wasn’t that cold. Sometimes death will do that, especially at dawn, with the police around and the grass wet, even when it comes as a friend.

  We stood for a minute watching the cars pass. “It’s a blessing,” Wallace said. It’s surprising how much traffic there is at 6:22 A.M.

  * * *

  That afternoon, I went back to the median and cut a little firewood to replace what the troopers had flung away. I could see the fire through the trees that night.

  I went back two nights later, after the funeral. The fire was going and it was the same bunch of bears, as far as I could tell. I sat around with them a while but it seemed to make them nervous, so I went home. I had taken a handful of newberries from the hubcap, and on Sunday I went with the boy and arranged them on Mother’s grave. I tried again, but it’s no use, you can’t eat them.

  Unless you’re a bear.

  LUCIUS SHEPARD AND ROBERT FRAZIER

  The All-Consuming

  Lucius Shepard was perhaps the most popular and influential new writer of the ’80s, rivaled for that title only by William Gibson, Connie Willis, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Shepard won the John W. Campbell Award in 1985 as the year’s Best New Writer, and no year since has gone by without him adorning the final ballot for one major award or another, and often for several. In 1987, he won the Nebula Award for his landmark novella “R & R,” and in 1988 he picked up a World Fantasy Award for his monumental short-story collection The Jaguar Hunter. His first novel was the acclaimed Green Eyes; his second the bestselling Life During Wartime; he is at work on several more. His latest books are a new collection, The Ends of the Earth, and a new novel, Kalimantan. His stories “Salvador” and “Black Coral” were in our Second Annual Collection; his stories “The Jaguar Hunter” and “A Spanish Lesson” were in our Third Annual Collection; “R & R” was in our Fourth Annual Collection; “Shades” was in our Fifth Annual Collection; “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter” was in our Sixth Annual Collection; and “The Ends of the Earth” was in our Seventh Annual Collection. Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, he now lives in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

  Robert Frazier is one of SF’s most popular and prolific poets, and his poems have appeared frequently in nearly every publication, professional or amateur, that will accept poetry at all. Several collections of his poetry have been published, including Peregrine, Perception Barriers, Co-Orbital Moons, Chronicles of the Mutant Rain Forest (with Bruce Boston), and A Measure of Calm (with Andrew Joron), and he has also edited the poetry anthology Burning With a Vision: Poetry of Science and the Fantastic. In 1980, he won the Rhysling Award for his poem “Encased in the Amber of Eternity.” For the last few years, he has been writing prose fiction as well, and his stories have appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Amazing, The Twilight Zone Magazine, New Pathways, and elsewhere. Frazier also lives in Nantucket.

  Here Shepard and Frazier join forces to serve up a bizarre and compelling story about a man with a very unusual relationship to the rest of the world: he eats it—or as much of it as he can get in his mouth, anyway.…

  The All-Consuming

  LUCIUS SHEPARD AND ROBERT FRAZIER

  Santander Jimenez was one of the towns that ringed the Malsueno, a kind of border station between the insane tangle of the rain forest and the more comprehensible and traditional insanity of the highlands. It was a miserable place of diesel smoke and rattling generators and concrete-block buildings painted in pastel shades of yellow, green and aqua, many with rusted Fanta signs over their doors, bearing names such as the Café of a Thousand Flowers or The Eternal Garden Bar or the Restaurant of Golden Desires, all containing fly-specked Formica tables and inefficient ceiling fans and fat women wearing grease-spattered aprons and discouraging frowns. Whores slouched beneath the buzzing neon marquee of the Cine Guevara. Drunks with bloody mouths lay in the puddles that mired the muddy streets. It was always raining. Even during the height of the dry season, the lake was so high that the playground beside it was half-submerged, presenting a surreal vista of drowned swing sets and seesaws.

  To the west of town, separated from the other buildings by a wide ground strewn with coconut litter and flattened beer cans, stood a market—a vast tin roof shading a hive of green wooden stalls. It was there that the marañeros would take the curious relics and still more curious produce that they collected in the heart of the rain forest: stone idols whose eyes glowed with electric moss; albino beetles the size of house cats; jaguar bones inlaid with seams of mineral that flowed like mercury; lizards with voices as sweet as nightingales; mimick vines, parrot plants and pavonine, with its addictive spores that afforded one a transitory mental contact with the creatures of the jungle.

  They were, for the most part, these marañeros, scrawny, rawboned men who wore brave tattoos that depicted lions and devils and laughing skulls. Their faces were scarred, disfigured by fungus and spirochetes, and when they walked out in the town, they were given a wide berth, not because of their appearance or their penchant for violence, which was no greater than that of the ordinary citizen, but because they embodied the dread mystique of the Malsueno, and in their tormented solitudes, they seemed the emblems of a death in life more frightening to the uninformed than the good Catholic death advertised by the portly priests at Santa Anna de la Flor del Piedra.

  Scarcely anyone
who lived in Santander Jimenez wanted to live there. A number of citizens had been driven to this extreme in order to hide from a criminal or politically unsound past. The most desperate of these were the marañeros—who but those who themselves were hunted would voluntarily enter the Malsueno to dwell for months at a time among tarzanals and blood vine and christomorphs?—and the most desperate of the marañeros, or so he had countenanced himself for 21 years, so many years that his desperation had mellowed to an agitated resignation, was a gaunt, graying man by the name of Arce Cienfuegos. In his youth, he had been an educator in the capital in the extreme west of the country, married to a beautiful woman, the father of an infant son, and had aspired to a career in politics. However, his overzealous pursuit of that career had set him at odds with the drug cartel; as a result, his wife and child had been murdered, a crime with which he had subsequently been charged, and he had been forced to flee to the Malsueno. For a time thereafter, he had been driven by a lust for revenge, for vindication, but when at last the drug cartel had been shattered, its leaders executed, revenge was denied him, and because those who could prove his innocence were in their coffins, the murder charge against him had remained open. Now, at the age of 48, his crime forgotten, although he might have returned to the capital, he was so defeated by time and solitude and grief he could no longer think of a reason to leave. Just as chemical pollutants and radiation had transformed the jungle into a habitat suitable to the most grotesque of creatures, living in the Malsueno had transformed him into a sour twist of a man who thrived on its green acids, its vegetable perversions, and he was no longer fit for life in the outside world. Or so he had convinced himself.

  Nonetheless, he yearned for some indefinable improvement in his lot, and to ease this yearning, he had lately taken to penetrating ever more deeply into the Malsueno, to daring unknown territory, telling himself that perhaps in the depths of the jungle, he would find a form of contentment, but knowing to his soul that what he truly sought was release from an existence whose despair and spiritual malaise had come to outweigh any fleshly reward.

  * * *

  One day, toward the end of the rainy season, Arce received word that a man who had taken a room at the Hotel America 66, one Yuoki Akashini, had asked to see him. In general, visitors to Santander Jimenez were limited to scientists hunting specimens and the odd tourist gone astray, and since, according to his informant, Mr. Akashini fell into neither of those categories, Arce’s curiosity was aroused. That evening, he presented himself at the hotel and informed the owner, Nacho Perez, a bulbous, officious man of 50, that he had an appointment with the Japanese gentleman. Nacho—who earned the larger part of his living by selling relics purchased from the marañeros at swindler’s prices—attempted to pry information concerning the appointment out of him; but Arce, who loathed the hotel owner, having been cheated by him on countless occasions, kept his own counsel. Before entering room 23, he poked his head in the door and saw a short, crewcut man in his early 30s standing by a cot, wearing gray trousers and a T-shirt. The man glowed with health and had the heavily developed arms and chest of a weight lifter. His smile was extraordinarily white and fixed and wide.

  “Señor Cienfuegos? Ah, excellent!” he said, and made a polite bow. “Please … come in, come in.”

  The room, which reeked of disinfectant, was of green concrete block and, like a jail cell, contained one chair, one cot, one toilet. Cobwebs clotted the transom and light was provided by a naked bulb dangling from a ceiling fixture. Mr. Akashini offered Arce the chair and took a position by the door, hands clasped behind his back and legs apart, like a soldier standing at ease.

  “I am told,” he said, his voice hoarse, his tone clipped, almost as if in accusation, “you know the jungle well.” He arched an eyebrow, lending an accent of inquiry to these words.

  “Well enough, I suppose.”

  Mr. Akashini nodded and made a rumbling noise deep in his throat—a sign of approval, Arce thought.

  “If you’re considering a trip into the jungle,” he said, crossing his legs, “I’d advise against it.”

  “I do not require a guide,” said Mr. Akashini. “I want you to bring me food.”

  Arce was nonplused. “There’s a restaurant downstairs.”

  Mr. Akashini stood blinking, as if absorbing this information, then threw back his head and laughed uproariously. “Very good! A restaurant downstairs!” He wiped his eyes. “You have mistaken my meaning. I want you to bring me food from the jungle. Here. This will help you understand.”

  He crossed to the cot, where a suitcase lay open, and removed from it a thick leather-bound album, which he handed to Arce. It contained photographs and newspaper clippings that featured shots of Mr. Akashini at dinner. The text of the majority of the clippings was in Japanese, but several were in Spanish, and it was apparent from these—which bestowed upon Mr. Akashini the title of The All-Consuming—and from the photographs that he was not eating ordinary food but objects of different sorts: automobiles, among them a Rolls-Royce Corniche; works of art, including several important expressionist canvases and a small bronze by Rodin; cultural artifacts of every variety, mostly American, ranging from items such as one of Elvis Presley’s leather-and-rhinestone jump suits, a guitar played by Jimi Hendrix and Lee Harvey Oswald’s Carcano rifle—obtained at “an absurd cost,” according to Mr. Akashini—to the structure of the first McDonald’s restaurant, a meal that, ground to a powder and mixed with gruel, had taken a year to complete. Arce did not understand what had compelled Mr. Akashini to enter upon this strange gourmandizing, but one thing was plain: The man was wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, and although this did not overly excite Arce, for he had few wants, nevertheless, he was not one to let an opportunity for profit slip away.

  “I am listed in the Guinness Book of World Records,” said Mr. Akashini proudly. “Three times.” He held up three fingers in order to firmly imprint this fact on Arce’s consciousness.

  Arce tried to look impressed.

  “I intend,” Mr. Akashini went on, “to eat the Malsueno. Not everything in it, of course.” He grinned and clapped Arce on the shoulder, as if to assure him of the limits of his appetite. “I wish to eat those things that will convey to me its essence. Things that embody the soul of the place.”

  “I see,” said Arce, but failed to disguise the puzzlement in his voice.

  “You are wondering, are you not,” said Mr. Akashini, tipping his head to the side, holding up a forefinger like an earnest lecturer, “why I do this?”

  “It’s not my business.”

  “Still, you wonder.” Mr. Akashini turned to the wall above his cot, again clasping his hands behind his back. He might have been standing on the bridge of a ship, considering a freshly conquered land. “I admit to a certain egocentric delight in accomplishment, but my desire to consume stems to a large degree from curiosity, from my love for other cultures, my desire to understand them. When I eat, you see, I understand. I cannot always express the understanding, but it is profound … more profound, I am convinced, than an understanding gained from study or travel or immersion in some facet of one culture or another. I know things about the United States that not even Americans know. I have tasted the inner mechanisms of American history, of the American experience. I have recently finished writing a book of meditations on the subject.” He turned to Arce. “Now, it is my intention to understand the Malsueno, to derive from its mutations, from the furies of the radiation and chemicals and poisons that created them, a comprehension of its essence. So I have come to you for assistance. I will pay well.”

  He named a figure that elevated Arce’s estimate of his wealth, and Arce signaled his acceptance.

  “But how can you expect to eat poison and survive?” he asked.

  “With caution.” Mr. Akashini chuckled and patted his flat belly.

  Arce pictured tiny cars, portraits, statuary, temples, entire civilizations in miniature inside Mr. Akashini’s stomach, floating upon an angry sea l
ike those depicted by the print maker Hokusai. The image infused the man’s healthy glow with a decadent character.

  “Please, have no fear about my capacity,” said Mr. Akashini. “I am in excellent condition and accustomed to performing feats of ingestion. And I have implants that will neutralize those poisons that my system cannot handle. So, if you are agreed, I will expect my first meal tomorrow.”

  “I’ll see to it.” Arce came to his feet and, easing around Mr. Akashini, made for the door.

  “Excuse, please!”

  Arce turned and was met with a flash that blinded him for a moment; as his vision cleared, he saw his employer lowering a camera.

  “See you at suppertime!” said Mr. Akashini.

  He nodded and smiled as if he already understood everything there was to know about Arce.

  * * *

  Although determined to earn his fee, Arce did not intend to risk himself in the deep jungle for such a fool as Mr. Akashini appeared to be. Who did the man think he was to believe he could ingest the venomous essence of the Malsueno? Likely, he would be dead in a matter of days, however efficient his implants. And so the following afternoon, without bothering to put on protective gear, Arce walked a short distance into the jungle and cast about for something exotic and inedible … but nothing too virulent. He did not want to lose his patron so quickly. Soon he found an appropriate entree and secured it inside a specimen bag. At dusk, his find laid out in a box of transparent plastic with a small hinged opening, he presented himself at the hotel. Room 23 had undergone a few changes. The cot had been removed, and in its place was a narrow futon. Dominating the room, making it almost impossible to move, was a mahogany dinner table set with fine linens and silverware and adorned with a silver candelabrum. Mr. Akashini, attired in a dinner jacket and a black tie, was seated at the table, smiling his gleaming edifice of a smile.