The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  While I did my reading, Bill was making travel plans.

  Were we going to South Georgia? Of course we were, although any rational process in my brain told me, more strongly than ever, that we would find nothing there. Luke and Louisa Derwent never reached the island. They had died, as so many others had died, in attempting that terrible southern passage below Cape Horn.

  There was surely nothing to be found. We knew that. But still we drained our savings, and Bill completed our travel plans. We would fly to Buenos Aires, then on to the Falkland Islands. After that came the final eight hundred miles to South Georgia, by boat, carrying the tiny two-person survey aircraft whose final assembly must be done on the island itself.

  Already we knew the terrain of South Georgia as well as anyone had ever known it. I had ordered a couple of SPOT satellite images of the island, good cloud-free pictures with ten meter resolution. I went over them again and again, marking anomalies that we wanted to investigate.

  Bill did the same. But at that point, oddly enough, our individual agendas diverged. His objective was the Analytical Engine, which had dominated his life for the past few months. He had written out, in full, the sequence of events that led to his discoveries in New Zealand, and to our activities afterwards. He described the location and nature of all the materials at Little House. He sent copies of everything, dated, signed, and sealed, to the library of his own university, to the British Museum, to the Library of Congress, and to the Reed Collection of rare books and manuscripts in the Dunedin Public Library. The discovery of the Analytical Engine—or of any part of it—somewhere on South Georgia Island would validate and render undeniable everything in the written record.

  And I? I wanted to find evidence of Louisa Derwent’s Analytical Engine, and even more so of the Heteromorphs. But beyond that, my thoughts turned again and again to Luke Derwent, in his search for the “great perhaps.”

  He had told Louisa that their journey was undertaken to bring Christianity to the cold-loving people; but I knew better. Deep in his heart he had another, more selfish motive. He cared less about the conversion of the Heteromorphs than about access to their great medical powers. Why else would he carry with him, for trading purposes, Louisa’s wondrous construct, the “marvel for this and every age”—a clanking mechanical computer, to beings who possessed machines small and powerful enough to serve as portable language translators.

  I understood Luke Derwent completely, in those final days before he sailed east. The love of his life was dying, and he was desperate. Would he, for a chance to save her, have risked death on the wild southern ocean? Would he have sacrificed himself, his whole crew, and his own immortal soul, for the one-in-a-thousand chance of restoring her to health? Would anyone take such a risk?

  I can answer that. Anyone would take the risk, and count himself blessed by the gods to be given the opportunity.

  I want to find the Analytical Engine on South Georgia, and I want to find the Heteromorphs. But more than either of those, I want to find evidence that Luke Derwent succeeded, in his final, reckless gamble. I want him to have beaten the odds. I want to find Louisa Derwent, frozen but alive in the still glaciers of the island, awaiting her resurrection and restoration to health.

  I have a chance to test the kindness of reality. For in just two days, Bill and I fly south and seek our evidence, our own “great perhaps.” Then I will know.

  But now, at the last moment, when we are all prepared, events have taken a more complex turn. And I am not sure if what is happening will help us, or hinder us.

  Back in Christchurch, Bill had worried about what I would tell people when we looked for help in the States. I told him that I would say as little as we could get away with, and I kept my word. No one was given more than a small part of the whole story, and the main groups involved were separated by the width of the continent.

  But we were dealing with some of the world’s smartest people. And today, physical distance means nothing. People talk constantly across the computer nets. Somewhere, in the swirling depths of GEnie, or across the invisible web of an Ethernet, a critical connection was made. And then the inevitable crosstalk began.

  Bill learned of this almost by accident, discussing with a travel agent the flights to Buenos Aires. Since then I have followed it systematically.

  We are not the only people heading for South Georgia Island. I know of at least three other groups, and I will bet that there are more.

  Half the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab seems to be flying south. So is a substantial fraction of the Stanford Computer Science Department, with additions from Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore. And from southern California, predictably, comes an active group centered on Los Angeles. Niven, Pournelle, Forward, Benford and Brin cannot be reached. A number of JPL staff members are mysteriously missing. Certain other scientists and writers from all over the country do not return telephone calls.

  What are they all doing? It is not difficult to guess. We are talking about individuals with endless curiosity, and lots of disposable income. Knowing their style, I would not be surprised if the Queen Mary were refurbished in her home at Long Beach, and headed south.

  Except that they, like everyone else, will be in a hurry, and go by air. No one wants to miss the party. These are the people, remember, who did not hesitate to fly to Pasadena for the Voyager close flybys of the outer planets, or to Hawaii and Mexico to see a total solar eclipse. Can you imagine them missing a chance to be in on the discovery of the century, of any century? Not only to observe it, but maybe to become part of the discovery process itself. They will converge on South Georgia in their dozens—their scores—their hundreds, with their powerful laptop computers and GPS terminals and their private planes and advanced sensing equipment.

  Logic must tell them, as it tells me, that we will find absolutely nothing. Luke and Louisa Derwent are a century dead, deep beneath the icy waters of the Drake Passage. With them, if the machine ever existed, lie the rusting remnants of Louisa’s Analytical Engine. The Heteromorphs, if they were ever on South Georgia Island, are long gone.

  I know all that. So does Bill. But win or lose, Bill and I are going. So are all the others.

  And win or lose, I know one other thing. After we, and our converging, energetic, curious, ingenious, sympathetic horde, are finished, South Georgia will never be the same.

  This is for Garry Tee—who is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Auckland;

  —who is a mathematician, computer specialist, and historian of science;

  —who discovered parts of Babbage’s Difference Machine in Dunedin, New Zealand;

  —who programmed the DEUCE computer in the late 1950s, and has been a colleague and friend since that time;

  —who is no more Bill Rigley than I am the narrator of this story.

  Charles Sheffield

  December 31, 1991

  CUSH

  Neal Barrett, Jr.

  Born in San Antonio, Texas, Neal Barrett, Jr., grew up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, spent several years in Austin, hobnobbing with the likes of Lewis Shiner and Howard Waldrop, moved with his family to Fort Worth for a while, and, at last report, was back in Austin again. He made his first sale in 1959, and has been a full-time freelancer for the past twelve years. In the last half of the eighties, Barrett became one of Asimov’s Science Fiction’s most popular writers, and gained wide critical acclaim for a string of pungent, funny, and unclassifiably weird stories he published there, such as “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus,” “Perpetuity Blues,” “Stairs,” “Highbrow,” “Trading Post,” “Class of ’61,” as well as for other great stories such as “Diner,” “Sallie C,” and “Winter on the Belle Fourche,” which were published in markets as diverse as Omni, The Best of the West, and The New Frontier. He has had stories in our Fourth, Sixth, and Tenth Annual Collections, as well two stories in our Fifth Annual Collection. His books include Stress Pattern, Karma Corps, the four-volume Aldair series, the critically ac
claimed novel Through Darkest America and its sequel Dawn’s Uncertain Light, and a very strange novel called The Hereafter Gang, which the Washington Post referred to as “the Great American Novel.” His most recent books are the comic mafia novel Pink Vodka Blues (which was optioned for a big-budget Hollywood movie), a new mystery entitled Dead Dog Blues, and a collection of some of his shorter work, Slightly Off Center.

  In the story that follows, an exceptional work even by Barrett’s high standard, he treats us to the uproariously funny, profoundly sad, gritty, gentle, and deeply weird story of a very unusual boy … and what his coming-of-age could mean to us all.

  * * *

  The cars started coming in the early hot locust afternoon, turning off the highway and onto the powder-dry road, cars from towns with names like Six Mile and Santuck and Wedowee and Hawk, small-print names like Uchee and Landerville and Sprott, cars from big cities like Birmingham and Mobile and even out of state, all winding down the narrow choked-up road, leaving plumes of red dust for the other cars behind, down through the midsummer August afternoon into deep green shade under sweetgum and sycamore and pine.

  The cars hesitated when they came to the bridge. The rust-iron, bolt-studded sides looked strong enough to hold the pyramids, but the surface of the bridge caused some alarm. The flat wooden timbers were weathered gray as stone, sagged and bent and bowed and warped every way but straight. Every time a car got across, the bridge gave a clatter-hollow death-rattle roll like God had made a center-lane strike. Reason said that the Buick up ahead had made it fine. Caution said this was a time to reflect on mortal life. One major funeral a day was quite enough. The best way to view these events was standing up.

  Aunt Alma Cree didn’t give two hoots about the bridge. She stopped in the middle of the span, killed the engine, and rolled the window down. There was nobody coming up behind. If they did, why they could wait. If they didn’t want to wait, they could honk and stomp around, which wouldn’t bother Alma Cree a bit. Alma had stood on the steps of Central High in Little Rock in ’56, looking up at grim white soldiers tall as trees. Nine years later, she’d joined the march from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King. Nothing much had disturbed her ever since. Not losing a husband who was only thirty-two. Not forty-three years teaching kids who were more concerned with street biology than reading Moby Dick.

  She sure wasn’t worried about a bridge. Least of all the one beneath her now. She knew this bridge like she knew her private parts. She knew that it was built around 1922 by a white man from Jackson who used to own the land. He didn’t like to farm, but he liked to get away from his wife. Alma’s grandfather bought the place cheap in ’36, and the family had lived there ever since. The timber on the bridge had washed away seven times, but the iron had always held. The creek had claimed a John Deere tractor, a Chevy, and a ’39 LaSalle. Alma knew all about the bridge.

  She remembered how she and her sister Lucy used to sneak off from the house, climb up the railing, and lean out far enough to spit. They’d spit and then wait, wait for the red-fin minnows and silver baby perch to come to lunch. They never seemed to guess it wasn’t something good to eat. Alma and Lucy would laugh until their sides nearly split, because spit fooled the fish every time. Didn’t nobody have less sense, Mama said, than two stringy-legged nigger gals who couldn’t hardly dry a dish. But Alma and Lucy didn’t care. They might be dumb, but they didn’t think spit was a fat green hopper or a fly.

  Alma sat and smelled the rich hot scent of creek decay. She listened to the lazy day chirring in the trees, the only sound in the silent afternoon. The bottom lay heat-dazed and drugged, tangled in heavy brush and vine. The water down below was still and deep, the surface was congealed and poison green. If you spit in the water now it wouldn’t sink. The minnows and the perch had disappeared. Farther up a ways, someone told Alma a year or two before, there was still good water, still cottonmouth heaven up there, and you could see a hundred turtles at a time, sleeping like green clots of moss on a log.

  But not down here, Alma thought. Everything here is mostly dead. She remembered picking pinks and puttyroot beside the creek, lady fern and toadshade in the woods. Now all that was gone, and the field by the house was choked with catbrier and nettle, and honeylocust sharp with bristle-thorns. The homeplace itself had passed the urge to creak and sigh. Every plank and nail had settled in and sagged as far as it could go. The house had been built in a grove of tall pecans, thick-boled giants that had shaded fifty years of Sunday picnic afternoons. The house had outlived every tree, and now they were gone too. A few chinaberries grew around the back porch, but you can’t hang a swing on a ratty little tree.

  “One day, that house is going to fall,” Alma said, in the quiet of the hot afternoon. One day it’s going to see that the creek and the land are bone dry and Mr. Death has nearly picked the place clean. Driving up from the creek on the red-dust road, she could feel the ghosts everywhere about. Grandpas and uncles and cousins twice removed, and a whole multitude of great aunts. Papa and Mama long gone, and sister Lucy gone too. No one in the big hollow house except Lucy’s girl Pru. Pru and the baby and Uncle John Fry, dead at a hundred and three. Dead and laid out in the parlor in a box.

  Lord God, Alma thought, the whole family’s come to this. A dead old man and crazy Pru, who’s tried to swallow lye twice. John Ezekiel Fry and Pru, and a one-eyed patchwork child, conceived in mortal sin.

  “And don’t forget yourself,” she said aloud. “You aren’t any great prize, Alma Cree.”

  * * *

  They couldn’t all get in the parlor, but as many came in as they could, the rest trailing out in the hall and through the door and down the porch, crowding in a knot in the heat outside. The window to the parlor was raised up high, so everyone could hear the preacher’s message fairly clear.

  Immediate family to the front, is what Preacher Will said, so Alma had to sit in a straight-back chair by her crazy niece Pru. Pru to her left, a cousin named Edgar to her right, a man she had never laid eyes on in her life.

  Where did they all come from? she thought, looking at the unfamiliar faces all about. Forty, maybe fifty people, driving in from everywhere, and not any three she could recall. Had she known them in the summer as a child, had they come to Thanksgiving some time? They were here, so they must be kin to Uncle Fry.

  It was hot as an oven outside the house and in. Before the service got fully underway, a stout lady fainted in the hall. And, as a great ocean liner draws everything near it down into the unforgiving sea, Mrs. Andrea Simms of Mobile pulled several people with her out of sight. Outside, an asp dropped from a chinaberry tree down the collar of an insurance man from Tullahoma, Tennessee. Cries went out for baking soda, but Pru had little more than lye and peanut butter in the house, so the family had to flee.

  * * *

  Preacher Will extolled the virtues of John Ezekiel Fry, noting that he had lived a long life, which anyone there could plainly see. Will himself was eighty-three, and he was certain Uncle Fry had never been inside his church at any time. Still, you had to say something, so Will filled in with Bible verse to make the service last. He knew the entire Old Testament and the New, everything but Titus and part of Malachi, enough to talk on through the summer and the fall, and somewhere into June.

  Alma felt inertia settling in. Her face was flushed with heat, and all her lower parts were paralyzed. Pru was swaying back and forth, humming a Michael Jackson tune. Cousin Edgar was dead or fast asleep. Not any of us going to last long, Alma thought, and Will isn’t even into Psalms.

  The Lord was listening in, or some northern saint who was mindful of the heat. At that very moment, the service came abruptly to a halt. A terrible cry swept through the house, ripped through every empty hall and dusty room, through every mousehole and weather crack, through every wall and floor. No one who heard the cry forgot. The sound was so lonely, so full of hurt and woe, so full of pain and sorrow and regret, a cry and a wail for all the grief and the misery the world had ev
er known, all the suffering and sin, all gathered in a single long lament.

  Crazy Pru was up and on her feet, the moment the sound began, Crazy Pru with her eyes full of fright, with a mother’s primal terror in her heart.

  “Oh Lord God,” she cried, “oh sweet Jesus, somethin’s happened to my child! Somethin’s wrong with little Cush!”

  Pru tore through the crowd, fought to reach the hall, Aunt Alma right behind. The people gave way, parting as they came, then trailed right up the stairs, leaving Uncle John Ezekiel Fry all alone with a row of empty chairs, alone except for Leonard T. Pyne.

  When Pru saw her child, she went berserk. She shrieked and pulled her hair, whirled in a jerky little dance, moaned and screamed and gagged, and collapsed in an overstuffed chair. Aunt Alma looked into the crib and thought her heart would surely stop. The child was bleeding from its single awful eye, bleeding from its mouth and from its nose, bleeding from its fingers and its toes, bleeding from its ears and from every tiny pore.

  Alma didn’t stop to think. She lifted up the child, this ugly little kicking screaming pinto-colored child with its possum arms and legs and its baked potato head, lifted up the child and shouted, “Get the hell out of my way, I’m coming through!”

  Alma ran out of the room and down the hall, the child slick and wet and pulsing like a fancy shower spray. In the bathroom, she laid Cush quickly in the tub and turned the faucet on full. She splashed the child and slapped it, held it right beneath the rushing tap. The red washed away, but Alma didn’t care about that. She prayed that the shock would trigger something vital inside and make the bleeding go away.

  The child howled until Alma thought her ears would surely burst. It fought to get free from the water streaming down upon its head, it twisted like an eel in her hands, but she knew that she couldn’t let it get away.