The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Rarely somebody stooped to pick up a journal, or put money in his hat, or both. Those people he tried to make eye contact with, smiling gently by way of inviting them in. He wouldn’t get any serious readers, serious talkers, probably, on a holiday weekend in a beach town, but you never knew. He was careful not to look at the others, the bypassers, but he kept track of them peripherally. He had been arrested quite a few times, assaulted a few. And since Colombia, he suffered from a chronic fear.

  Mare came and sat with him on Sunday. He didn’t mind having her there. She was comfortable with his silence; she seemed naturally silent herself, much of the time. She read from old copies of his journal and shared the best parts with him as if he hadn’t been the writer, the editor, holding a page out for him silently and waiting, watching, while he read to the end. Then her marginalia were terse, absolute: “Ick.” “I’m glad.” “She shouldn’t have gone.” “I’d never do that.”

  After quite a while, she had him read what he had written about a town in the Guatemala highlands where he had spent a couple of months, and then she said, in a changed way, timid, earnest, “I lived there before. But I was a different person.”

  He had not got around to writing anyone about the epilepsy after he’d lost that first strong feeling of its possibility. His silence invited squirrels, he knew that, though it made him tired, unhappy, thinking of it. He was tired now, suddenly, and annoyed with her. He shook his head, let her see a flat, skeptical smile.

  “Mare!”

  The father came across the shaggy grass moving swiftly, his arms swinging in a stiff way, elbows akimbo. Jay stood up warily.

  “I’m locked out of the damn house,” the man said, not looking at Jay. “Where’s your key?”

  Mare got up from the grass, dug around in her pockets and brought out a key with a fluorescent pink plastic keeper. He closed his fingers on it, made a vague gesture with the fist. “I about made up my mind to bust a window,” he said. “I was looking for you.” He was annoyed.

  Mare put her hands in her pockets, looked at her feet. “I’m helping him stop the war,” she said, murmuring.

  The man’s eyes went to Jay and then the posterboard sign, the hat, the stacked-up journals. His face kept hold of that look of annoyance, but took on something else too, maybe it was just surprise. “He’s putting up signs and hustling for money, is what it looks like he’s doing,” he said, big and arrogant. For a while longer he stood there looking at the sign as if he were reading it. Maybe he was. He had a manner of standing—shifting his weight from foot to foot and hitching at his pants every so often with the knuckles of his hands.

  “I got a kidney shot out, in North Africa,” he said suddenly. “But there’s not much fighting there anymore, that front’s moved south or somewhere. I don’t know who’s got that ground now. They can keep it, whoever.” He had a long hooked nose, bony ridges below his eyes, a wide, lipless mouth. Strong features. Jay could see nothing of him in Mare’s small pale face. It wasn’t evident, how they were with each other. Jay saw her now watching her dad through her bangs, with something like the shyness she had with everyone else.

  “Don’t be down here all day,” her dad said to her, gesturing again with the fist he had closed around the housekey. He looked at Jay but he didn’t say anything else. He shifted his weight one more time and then walked off long-strided, swinging his long arms. He was tall enough some of the tourists looked at him covertly after he’d passed them. Mare watched him too. Then she looked at Jay, a ducking, sideward look. He thought she was embarrassed by her dad. He shrugged. It’s okay. But that wasn’t it. She said, pulling in her thin shoulders timidly, “There is a lake there named Negro because the water is so dark.” She had remained focused on his disbelief, waiting to say this small proving thing about Guatemala. And it was true enough to shake him a little. There was a Lago Negro in about every country below the U.S. border, he remembered that in a minute. But there was a long startled moment before that, when he only saw the little black lake in the highlands, in Guatemala, and Mare, dark faced, in a dugout boat paddling away from the weedy shore.

  * * *

  He had the store rip four long stringers out of a clear fir board and then he kerfed the stringers every three inches along their lengths. With the school year started he didn’t have Mare to hold the long pieces across the sawhorses. He got the cuts done slowly, single-handed, bracing the bouncy long wood with his knee.

  Mare’s dad came up the road early in the day. Jay thought he wasn’t looking for the garage. There was a flooded cranberry field on the other side of the road and he was watching the people getting in the crop from it. There were two men and three women wading slowly up and down in green rubber hip waders, stripping off the berries by hand into big plastic buckets. Mare’s dad, walking along the road, watched them. But when he came even with the garage he turned suddenly and walked up the driveway. Jay stopped what he was doing and waited, holding the saw. Mare’s dad stood just inside the rollaway door, shifting his weight, knuckling his hips.

  “I heard you were building a boat,” he said, looking at the wood, not at Jay. “You never said how long you wanted to camp, but I didn’t figure it would be long enough to build a boat.” Jay thought he knew where this was headed. He’d been hustled along plenty of times before this. But it didn’t go that way. The man looked at him. “In that letter you showed, I figured you meant you could talk if you wanted to.” He sounded annoyed, as he had been on Labor Day weekend with Mare. “Now I heard your tongue was cut off,” he said, lifting his chin, reproachful.

  Jay kept standing there holding the saw, waiting. He hadn’t been asked anything. The man dropped his eyes. He turned partway from Jay and looked over his shoulder toward the cranberry bog, the people working there. There was a long stiff silence.

  “She’s a weird kid,” he said suddenly. “You figured that out by now, I guess.” His voice was loud; he may not have had soft speaking in him anywhere. “I’d have her to a psychiatrist, but I can’t afford it.” He hitched at his pants with the backs of both hands. “I guess she likes you because you don’t say anything. She can tell you whatever she wants and you’re not gonna tell her she’s nuts.” He looked at Jay. “You think she’s nuts?” His face had a sorrowful aspect now, his brows drawn up in a heavy pleat above the bridge of his nose.

  Jay looked at the saw. He tested the row of teeth against the tips of his fingers and kept from looking at the man. He realized he didn’t know his name, first or last, or if he had a wife. Where was Mare’s mother?

  The man blew out a puffing breath through his lips. “I guess she is,” he said unhappily. Jay ducked his head, shrugged. I don’t know. He had been writing about Mare lately—pages that would probably show up in the journal, in the October mailing. He had spent a lot of time wondering about her, and then writing it down. This was something new to wonder about. He had thought her dad was someone else, not this big sorrowful man looking for reassurance from a stranger who camped in his park.

  A figure of jets passed over them suddenly, flying inland from the ocean. There were six. They flew low, dragging a screaming roar, a shudder, through the air. Mare’s dad didn’t look up.

  “She used to tell people these damn dreams of hers all the time,” the man said, after the noise was past. “I know I never broke her of it, she just got sly who she tells them to. She never tells me anymore.” He stood there silently looking at the cranberry pickers. “The last one she told me,” he said, in his heavy, unquiet voice, “was how she’d be killed dead when she was twelve years old.” He looked over at Jay. “She didn’t tell you that yet,” he said, when he saw Jay’s face. He smiled in a bitter way. “She was about eight, I guess, when she told me that one.” He thought about it and then he added, “She’s twelve now. She was twelve in June.” He made a vague gesture with both hands, a sort of open-palms shrugging. Then he pushed his hands down in his back pockets. He kept them there while he shifted his weight in that manner he had, a
lmost a rocking back and forth.

  Watching him, Jay wondered suddenly if Mare might not put herself in the path of something deadly, to make sure this dream was a true one—a proof for her dad. He wondered if her dad had thought of that.

  “I don’t know where she gets her ideas,” the man said, making a pained face, “if it’s from TV or books or what, but she told me when she got killed it’d be written up, and in the long run it’d help get the war ended. Before that, she never had noticed we were even in a war.” He looked at Jay wildly. “Maybe I’m nuts too, but here you are, peace-peddling in our backyard, and when I saw you with those magazines you write, I started to wonder what was going on. I started to wonder if this is a damn different world than I’ve been believing all my life.” His voice had begun to rise so by the last few words he sounded plaintive, teary. Jay had given up believing in God the year he was eighteen. He didn’t know what it was that Gathered a Meeting into the Light, but he didn’t think it was God. It occurred to him, he couldn’t have told Mare’s dad where the borders were of the world he, Jay, believed in.

  “I don’t have a reason for telling you this,” the man said after a silence. He had brought his voice down again so he sounded just agitated, defensive. “Except I guess I wondered if I was nuts, and I figured I’d ask somebody who couldn’t answer.” His mouth spread out flat in a humorless grin. He took his hands out of his pockets, hitched up his pants. “I thought about kicking you on down the road, but I guess it wouldn’t matter. If it isn’t you, it’ll be somebody else. And”—his eyes jumped away from Jay—“I was afraid she might quick do something to get herself killed, if she knew you were packing up.” He waited, looking off across the road. Then he looked at Jay. “I’ve been worrying, lately, that she’ll get killed all right, one way or the other, either it’ll come true on its own or she’ll make it.”

  They stood together in silence in the dim garage, looking at the cut out pieces of Jay’s boat. He had the deck and hull bottom pieces, the bulkheads, the transom, the knee braces cut out. You could see the shape of the boat in some of them, in the curving lines of the cuts.

  “I guess you couldn’t taste anything without a tongue,” the man said after a while. He looked at Jay. “I’d miss that more than the talking.” He knuckled his hips and walked off toward the road. All his height was in his legs. He walked fast with a loose, sloping gait on those long legs.

  * * *

  In the afternoon Jay took a clam shovel out of the garage and walked down to the beach. The sand was black and oily from an offshore spill or a sinking. There wasn’t any debris on the low tide, just the oil. Maybe on the high tide there would be wreckage, or oil-fouled birds. He walked along the edge of the surf on the wet black sand looking for clam sign. There wasn’t much. He dug a few holes without finding anything. He hadn’t expected to. Almost at dusk he saw somebody walking toward him from way down the beach. Gradually it became Mare. She didn’t greet him. She turned alongside him silently and walked with him, studying the sand. She carried a denim knapsack that pulled her shoulders down: blocky shapes of books, a lunch box. She hadn’t been home yet. If she had gone to the garage and not found him there, she didn’t say so.

  He touched the blade of the shovel to the sand every little while, looking in the pressure circle for the stipple of clams. He didn’t look at Mare. Something, maybe it was a clam sign, irised in the black sheen on the sand. He dug a fast hole straight down, slinging the wet mud sideways. Mare crouched out of the way, watching the hole. “I see it!” She dropped on the sand and pushed her arm in the muddy hole, brought it out again reflexively. Blood sprang along the cut of the razor-shell, bright red. She held her hands together in her lap while her face brought up a look, a slow unfolding of surprise and fear. Jay reached for her, clasping both her hands between his palms, and in a moment she saw him again. “It cut me,” she said, and started to cry. The tears maybe weren’t about her hand.

  He washed out the cut in a puddle of salt water. He didn’t have anything to wrap around it. He picked up the clam shovel in one hand and held onto her cut hand with the other. They started back along the beach. He could feel her pulse in the tips of his fingers. What did you dream, he wanted to say.

  It had begun to be dark. There was no line dividing the sky from the sea, just a griseous smear and below it the cream-colored lines of surf. Ahead of them Jay watched something rolling in the shallow water. It came up on the beach and then rode out again. The tide was rising. Every little while the surf brought the thing in again. It was pale, a driftlog, it rolled heavily in the shallow combers. Then it wasn’t a log. Jay let down the shovel and Mare’s hand and waded out to it. The water was cold, dark. He took the body by its wrist and dragged it up on the sand. It had been chewed on, or shattered. The legs were gone, and the eyes, the nose. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. He dragged it way up on the beach, on the dry sand, above the high tide line. Mare stood where she was and watched him.

  He got the clam shovel and went back to the body and began to dig a hole beside it. The sand was silky, some of it slipped down and tried to fill the grave as he dug. In the darkness, maybe he was shoveling out the same hole over and over. The shovel handle was sticky, from Mare’s blood on his palms. When he looked behind him, he saw Mare sitting on the sand, huddled with her thin knees pulled up, waiting. She held her hurt hand with the other one, cradled.

  When he had buried the legless body, he walked back to her and she stood up and he took her hand again and they went on along the beach in the darkness. He was cold. His wet shoes and his jeans grated with sand. The cut on Mare’s hand felt sticky, hot, where he clasped his palm against it. She said, in a whisper, “I dreamed this, once.” He couldn’t see her face. He looked out but he couldn’t see the water, only hear it in the black air, a ceaseless, numbing murmur. He remembered the look that had come in her face when she had first seen his boat-building. There are mines in the strait. He wondered if that was when she had dreamed this moment, this white body rolling up on the sand.

  He imagined Mare dead. It wasn’t hard. He didn’t know what kind of a death she could have that would end the war, but he didn’t have any trouble seeing her dead. He had seen a lot of dead or dying children, written about them. He didn’t know why imagining Mare’s thin body, legless, buried in sand, brought up in his mouth the remembered salt taste of tears, or blood, or the sea.

  “I know,” he said, though what came out was shapeless, ill-made, a sound like Ah woe. Mare didn’t look at him. But in a while she leaned in to him in the darkness and whispered against his cheek. “It’s okay,” she said, holding on to his hand. “I won’t tell.”

  He had sent off the pages of his October journal already, and Mare was in them, and Lago Negro, and the father standing shifting his feet, not looking up as the jets screamed over him. It occurred to Jay suddenly, it would not matter much, the manner of her dying. She had dreamed her own death and he had written it down, and when she was dead he would write that, and her death would charge the air with its manifest, exquisitely painful truth.

  JOHN KESSEL

  Invaders

  Here’s a wry and blackly ironic story that contrasts and compares two different sorts of invaders, and draws some very uncomfortable conclusions.…

  Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is a professor of American literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University. Kessel made his first sale in 1975, and has since become a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, as well as to many other magazines and anthologies. Kessel’s first solo novel, Good News From Outer Space, was released last year to wide critical acclaim, but before that he had made his mark on the genre primarily as a writer of highly imaginative, finely crafted short stories. He won a Nebula Award in 1983 for his superlative novella “Another Orphan,” which was also a Hugo finalist that year, and was released as one
half of a Tor Double. His other books include the novel Freedom Beach, written in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly, and, coming up, a collection of his short fiction, Meeting in Infinity, from Arkham House. He is currently at work on a new novel, Corrupting Dr. Nice. Kessel’s story “Hearts Do Not in Eyes Shine” was in our First Annual Collection; his story “Friend,” written with James Patrick Kelly, was in our Second Annual Collection; his “The Pure Product” was in our Fourth Annual Collection; and his “Mrs. Shummel Exits a Winner” was in our Sixth Annual Collection.

  Invaders

  JOHN KESSEL

  15 November 1532:

  That night no one slept. On the hills outside Cajamarca, the campfires of the Inca’s army shone like so many stars in the sky. De Soto said Atahualpa had perhaps forty thousand troops under arms, but looking at the myriad lights spread across those hills, de Candia realized that estimate was, if anything, low.

  Against them, Pizarro could throw one hundred foot soldiers, sixty horse, eight muskets, and four harquebuses. Pizarro, his brother Hernando, de Soto, and Benalcázar laid out plans for an ambush. De Candia and his artillery would be hidden in the building along one side of the square, the cavalry and infantry along the others. De Candia watched Pizzaro prowl through the camp that night, checking the men’s armor, joking with them, reminding them of the treasure they would have, and the women. The men laughed nervously and whetted their swords.