The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Stomach never walks anywhere, so Sheriff Middleton drives him out to the edge of town where the man who calls himself Elijah is taping something that looks a little like a CB aerial and a little like a chromium Bay Prawn and not a whole lot like either to the side of a Pastor Drew McDowell Ministries hoarding.

  There’s never any way of making this sweet and easy, so don’t even bother trying.

  “Could you tell me what you’re doing, sir?”

  “I’m just positioning the last geomantic enhancer in the matrix so Rainmaker can follow it straight in. They won’t have any visual guidance because of the cloud, so the Navigators will have to follow the geomantic beacons as they come in over the desert.”

  Stomach may be an Eastwood fan, but Sheriff Middleton, he’s seen In the Heat of the Night twelve times. Best Rod Steiger roll of the jowls. Slide of the mirror shades up the nose with the baby finger. Great banks of black clouds reflected in the shades, like a black iron anvil out there over the Blood of Christ Mountains.

  “I think maybe you should take it down sir.”

  “Why should I do that? Is it offending anyone?”

  “No sir. As far as I know, it is not an offense to be in possession of peculiar-looking objects. However, I would surely appreciate it if you would take it, and all the rest of your geowhatchamacallit squoodiddlies down. Right now. If you please.”

  “You don’t quite seem to understand—”

  “Correction. You don’t quite seem to understand, sir. I want you, and all your micro-climatological doofuses and whatever the hell else you got in that bag of yours, on a bus out of here by eight tonight. Heard say you were headed north. Up over the dam, Neonville way, why don’t you just take yourself and your Rainmaker away out of here up there?”

  “Sir, with or without me, the Rainmaker is coming. No one can stop it now. Day and night the Flight Guild has been out on the high wires, rigging the sails to catch the wind the Weatherworkers are summoning, the wind that brings the Rainmaker.”

  Clouds race across the twin mirrors over Sheriff Middleton’s eyes, and the crazy wind from an unseasonable quarter strokes his skin. It is strong on his cheek like old whiskey tears. It tastes like jalapeños roasting on a charcoal fire, it sounds like a lone guitar bending fifths under a grapefruit moon. He can see it, the crazy wind, suddenly superimposed on his shades like the stress patterns in pick-up windows, wheeling round out there somewhere off the coast of Mexico carrying before it a great raft of warm, wet clouds. And there at the center, something glittering and delicate and transparent as an angel’s soul. He sees it all … and then he takes his glasses off to wipe them, and it’s gone, wiped away, a smear on finger and thumb tip.

  “If you’d just get in the car, sir, I’ll take you back to the bus station and have someone pick up your things from the Motel. Word of advice sir, don’t even think of setting foot out of there ’cept you setting it on a bus.” Rainmakers … flying cities … Soon as you get back behind your desk, Sheriff, you push buttons on that computer of yours and see if any freak hospitals are missing anyone.

  A bus pants past, blue silver, dust and diesel. Chain lightning crawls along the edge of the world where the Blood of Christ Mountains meet the sky.

  * * *

  Weatherworkers? Flight Guilds? Is this some medieval city state set adrift in the stratosphere, complete with guilds and mysteries? Is there a vagrant Prince-Bishop lurking somewhere, or a wandering Blondin? Each man has his mystery, Guilds there certainly are, Guilds to tend the hydroponic gardens in the main residential bubble, Guilds to maintain the wind rotors that generate the electricity for Rainmaker’s lights and hairdryers, guilds of teachers and doctors and lawyers and undertakers and sanitation engineers; does their very mundaneness make the airborne city state seem more credible? Listen, there is more.

  Highest of the ten Guilds Major and Minor are the Rainmakers themselves, the weather-workers, a caste confined by a dominant vertigo gene to the central levels of the administrative spindle. Second to them are the Navigation and Flight Guilds, ancient rivals; the one redoubtable mappers of the topology of the sky who steer Rainmaker through the titanic chasms of air, the others daredevils of the silk-thin rigging wires (oblivious miles above ground zero) who tune the rippling acres of transparent mylar sail. Least of all the Guilds is the Guild of Heralds, for it is the only one to defile itself by walking upon the face of the earth. Yet the least of the guilds is also the greatest, for without a herald walking upon the earth Rainmaker would sail the sky purposeless as a child’s bubble.

  Why the Rainmaker took its name and its sacred task; this is the Essential Mystery. You will find no answer in the Great Log in Flight Control at the center of the administrative spindle. Nor will you find it in the memories of the guildpersons, even as they weave the clouds and shape the winds and spread their wings across the dry places. You will find no answer because the question is never asked. “Why” is a wild, untamed word. It leads, one sure foot after another, toward the edge of the void. The people of Rainmaker do not ask “why” questions because they know that the answer might be that there is no answer. Rainmaker makes rain because it makes rain.

  But for you, dry-souled one, chili-dogger, dance-hall sweetheart, with the dust blowing in your bones, for you that is reason enough; Rainmaker makes rain and the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, watering the earth, like the word of God that does not return to him empty.

  * * *

  Seven-thirty, black as a preacher’s hat. Hot as his Hell. Atmosphere tense as a mid-period Hitchcock. You’ve either got a migraine or murder in mind. Say, maybe those little men in the hats with the tracts are right, maybe this is the Apocalypse, right now, maybe, right in the middle of the prime-time soaps Jehovah the Ancient of Days is coming in clouds and lightning to judge the souls of all men.

  Judgment punching up from the mountains is reflected in Kelly By the Window’s shades as she drives to work. It’s less than two blocks but she won’t walk, not even on the day when God comes to judge her soul; that little red convertible is all the salvation she needs. The heat; even with the top down the sweat’s dripping down her sides.

  She sees him sitting on the bench by the door, backlit by the fluttering butterfly of the Budweiser sign. Bag at his feet, looks like the wind’s about to blow Professor Marvel away again, high over the desert with the lights of desert towns and buses far below his rippling, flapping coat-tails.

  “Sheriff Middleton throw you out?”

  “He did.”

  “Sheriff Middleton, he’s the same as the rest of them. He’s afraid of anything that isn’t exactly the way it’s always been.”

  “There are many like him, sister. But things change, with or without Sheriff Middleton.”

  “Thought where you’re going, Rainmaker?”

  “Up north. I have to see a woman and a boy. My boy. My successor. There is only ever one Herald, and he walks the earth alone, until he finds a woman of the earth who loves him enough to perpetuate the Guild. We serve the Rainmaker, but we may never set foot upon it. After that, I don’t know. Wherever I am needed. Wherever things need to change.”

  “I’m going there too. Get in.” He smiles and his bag of geowhatchamacallit squoodiddlies and micro-climatological doofuses goes in the back and he goes in the front, and off they drive, right down the street, past the blue and silver buses and the sign that says population: elevation:

  “What’s your name, sister?” the old man says.

  “Kelly. I hate it. It’s so undignified. Can you imagine an eighty-year-old grandmother called Kelly?”

  “Can’t say I’ve met that many.”

  She shakes her hair free to blow back in the hot wind. Carmine polished nails search the airwaves; throbbing to major sevenths the little red convertible is swallowed by the night. Beneath a sky crazy with lightning, he asks, “Tell me, why did you take me?”

  “Because you made my mind up. Right there, in the street outside Desert Rose’s. At la
st, you decided me. Without you, I’d have stayed behind that bar looking out the window at all the people coming from someplace, going to someplace until I grew old like the rest of them, with no destination, no direction, no kind of movement or change.”

  Lightning stabs up from the horizon; for a hundred miles in every direction the desert is flashlit vampire blue. Battened down tight, a bus runs for town. Like a startled fox, a roadsign catches the light of the headlamps: Havapai Point, two miles.

  “Could you stop the car?” says the old man. Radio powerchords go bouncing down the highway, headlamps slew round illuminating one hundred miles of old Diet Coke cans. “I’d like to go up there. I know I can never be there, but I’d like to see it, when it comes. Would it be possible?”

  She’s already clawing for reverse.

  Cochise came up here, to read the future of the red man, and saw Jeff Chandler. Jeff Chandler came up here, plus film crew, best boy, key grip and catering caravan, to play Cochise looking into a Panaflex. Chief Blumberg, last of Nohopés came up here and saw a chair on the barbershop porch. And now Kelly By the Window and the Herald of the Rainmaker stand here, the land cowering at their feet under a sky like the Hammer of God.

  “Sunday nights when Sam didn’t need me, I’d come up here with Mario from the garage. Some nights, when I just couldn’t stand any more, when it felt like my skull was going to explode, it was so full of nothing, we’d take the car and drive and drive and drive but however far we drove we’d always end up here, up at the Point. We were scared, like the rest of them, you see. Mario, he’d turn on the radio and flick on the headlights and we’d dance, like the headlights were spotlights. They used to have this great Golden Oldies show on Sunday nights, Motown and the Doobie Brothers and sometimes Nat King Cole, and we’d dance real close, real slow, and pretend we’d won a million on a game show and we were whooping it up in a fancy nightclub in Neonville. Sometimes we’d say we were going to drive all night and wake up in Mexico.” A solid column of ion-blue plasma flickers between earth and heaven. “Whoo!” yells Kelly By the Window. “That was a big one!” She likes to shout at the storm.

  “Close,” says Elijah, listening to the sky. “I can feel it, up there, somewhere. Rainmaker is here.” Thunder tears like ten thousand miles of ripping grave-cloth. “She’s shorting out the storm, channelling the lightning down the mainframe to the discharge capacitors in the tail. One hundred million volts!”

  She shivers, hugs herself.

  “You’re crazy, old man. Crazy crazy crazy, and you know something? It’s good to be crazy!”

  And then they hear it.

  And the buses in the depot and Sam My Man brewing up the bribes for another night’s heavy dealin’ and Wanda the manageress with her ever-circling television families and Chief Blumberg with bottle in hand and Sheriff Middleton, treating his good good buddy to a few chili dogs, and all the dust-dry, bone-dry faces and places of a desert town, even Desert Rose herself, whip-crackin’ away in neon spangles and boots: they all hear it. And stop. And look at the sky in wonder.

  The clouds open. The rain comes down on the town. Old, hard rain, rain that has been locked up for seven years and now is free; mean rain, driving down upon a desert town. Thunder bawls, lightning flashes; Wanda’s deluxe cables burn out in a blare of static. In the diner faces press to the glass, mouths open in amazement at the drops streaming down the windows. On the barbershop porch Chief Blumberg rocks forward and back, forward and back, laughing like a crazy old Indian.

  Up on Havapai Point the young woman and the old man are soaked to the bones in an instant. They do not care. Kelly By the Window, she dances in the headlights of her little red convertible, hair sodden snarls and tangles, print dress plastered over small, flat breasts. She throws back her head to taste the good, hard rain, it tastes like kisses, it tastes like iced Mexican beer.

  “Look,” says the Herald of the Rainmaker, in a voice she has never heard before. And she looks where he is pointing, and, in a lightning bolt of illumination, she sees. She will never be certain what. Something. Half hidden by clouds, delicate as a dragonfly wing, strong as diamond, something that lives in the storm, something that overshadows desert and town like the wings of the Thunderbird. Something she knows she will never be free from again, because what she has seen is not just a something that might have been a Rainmaker, but a something that might have been a world that should have been, where cities can fly, and sail, and walk, and dive, where cities can be birds, and flowers, and crystals, and smoke, and dreams.

  As she sees it, she knows that it is for this moment only. She will never see it again, though she will gladly spend the rest of her life searching for it.

  There are tears behind her shades as she drives away from Havapai Point, into the rain, into the welcoming night.

  * * *

  They find the car in a ditch three miles out of Neonville city limits. It has gone clear through the hoarding; big hole right where the Republican candidate’s heart used to be. The paramedic team admire her accuracy. The radio is on. Her dress is soaking wet, when they pull her from the wreck, she still has on her shades. They lay her by the side of the road while they try to decide what to do with her. Someone suggests they call Sheriff Middleton. They think they’ve seen this little red convertible before, cruising the boulevard of abandoned dreams with the top down.

  Someone says they think maybe there was another passenger; little things; half-clues, semi-evidences. He (or she) must just have walked away.

  Someone says they heard it rained down south of the dam last night. First time in seven years.

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  Hot Sky

  Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. Silverberg has won five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards. His novels include, Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrach In the Furnace, Tom O’Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, and At Winter’s End. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, and Beyond the Safe Zone. His most recent book is Nightfall, a novel-length expansion of Isaac Asimov’s famous story, done in collaboration with Asimov himself, and the novel The Face of the Waters. Upcoming is another novel in collaboration with Asimov, Child of Time. For many years he edited the prestigious anthology series New Dimensions, and has recently, along with his wife, Karen Haber, taken over the editing of the Universe anthology series. His story “Multiples” was in our First Annual Collection; “The Affair” was in our Second Annual Collection; “Sailing to Byzantium”—which won a Nebula Award in 1986—was in our Third Annual Collection; “Against Babylon” was in our Fourth Annual Collection; “The Pardoner’s Tale” was in our Fifth Annual Collection; “House of Bones” was in our Sixth Annual Collection; and both “Tales from the Venia Woods” and the Hugo-winning “Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another” were in our Seventh Annual Collection. He lives in Oakland, California.

  In the story that follows, he takes us along on a hard-edged, high-tech mission on the high seas of a troubled near-future world—and shows us that no matter how sophisticated the technology becomes, some things never really change.

  Hot Sky

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  Out there in the chilly zone of the Pacific, somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii, the sea was a weird goulash of currents, streams of cold stuff coming up from the antarctic and coolish upwelling spirals out of the ocean floor and little hot rivers rolling off the sun-blasted continental shelf far to the east. Sometimes you could see steam rising in places where cold water met warm. It was a cockeyed place to be trawling for icebergs. But the albedo readings said there was a berg somewhere around there, and so the Tonopah Maru was there, too.

  Carter sat in front of the scanner, massaging the numbers in the cramped cell that
was the ship’s command center. He was the trawler’s captain, a lean, 30ish man, yellow hair, brown beard, skin deeply tanned and tinged with the iridescent greenish-purple of his armoring build-up, the protective layer that the infra-ultra drugs gave you. It was midmorning. The shot of Screen he’d taken at dawn still simmered like liquid gold in his arteries. He could almost feel it as it made its slow journey outward to his capillaries and trickled into his skin, where it would carry out the daily refurbishing of the body armor that shielded him against ozone crackle and the demon eye of the sun.

  This was only his second year at sea. The company liked to move people around. In the past few years, he’d been a desert jockey in bleak, forlorn Spokane, running odds reports for farmers betting on the month the next rainstorm would turn up, and before that a cargo dispatcher for one of the company’s L-5 shuttles, and a chip runner before that. And one of these days, if he kept his nose clean, he’d be sitting in a corner office atop the Samurai pyramid in Kyoto. Carter hated a lot of the things he’d had to do in order to play the company game. But he knew that it was the only game there was.

  “We got maybe a two-thousand-kiloton mass there,” he said, looking into the readout wand’s ceramic-fiber cone. “Not bad, eh?”

  “Not for these days, no,” Hitchcock said. He was the oceanographer/navigator, a grizzled, flat-nosed Afro-Hawaiian whose Screen-induced armor coloring gave his skin a startling midnight look. Hitchcock was old enough to remember when icebergs were never seen farther north than the latitude of southern Chile. “Man, these days, a berg that’s still that big all the way up here must have been three counties long when it broke off the fucking polar shelf. But you sure you got your numbers right, man?”

  The implied challenge brought a glare to Carter’s eyes, and something went curling angrily through his interior, leaving a hot little trail. Hitchcock never thought Carter did anything right the first time. Although he often denied it—too loudly—it was pretty clear Hitchcock had never quite gotten over his resentment at being bypassed for captain in favor of an outsider. Probably he thought it was racism. But it wasn’t. Carter was managerial track; Hitchcock wasn’t. That was all there was to it.