Shades

Shades

By Lucius Shepard

The night was moonless, with a few stars showing low on the horizon; the spiky crowns of the palms ringing the village were silhouettes pinned onto a lesser blackness. It was so humid, it felt like you could spoon in the air. I crossed the dirt road, found a patch of grass near the tin-roofed building and sat down. The door to the building was cracked, spilling a diagonal of white radiance onto the ground, and I had the notion that there was no machine inside, only a mystic boil of whiteness emanating from Tuu`s silky hair. A couple of soldiers walked past and nodded to me; they paused a few feet father along to light cigarettes, which proceeded to brighten and fade with the regularity of tiny beacons.

Crickets sawed, frogs chirred, and listening to them, smelling the odor of sweet rot from the jungle, I thought about a similar night when I’d been stationed at Phnoc Vinh, about a party we’d had with a company of artillery. There had been a barbecue pit and iced beer and our CO had given special permission for whores to come on the base. It had been a great party; in fact, those days at Phnoc Vinh had been the best time of the war for me. The artillery company had had this terrific cook, and on movie nights he’d make doughnuts. Jesus, I’d loved those doughnuts! They’d tasted like home, like peace. I’d kick back and munch a doughnut and watch the bullshit movie, and it was almost like being in my own living room, watching the tube. Trouble was, Phnoc Vinh had softened me up, and after three weeks, when we’d been airlifted to Quan Loi, which was constantly under mortar and rocket fire, I’d nearly gotten my ass blown off.

A hypnotized purple princess. Illustration by Elena

Footsteps behind me. Startled, I turned and saw what looked a disembodied white shirt floating toward me. I came to one knee, convinced for the moment that some other ghost had been lured to the machine; but a second later a complete figure emerged from the dark: Tuu. Without a word, he sat cross-legged beside me. He was smoking a cigarette… or so I thought until I caught a whiff of marijuana. He took a deep drag, the coal illuminating his placid features, and offered me the joint. I hesitated, not wanting to be pals, but tempted by the smell, I accepted it, biting back a smartass remark about Marxist permissiveness. It was good shit. I could feel the smoke twisting through me, finding out all my hollow places. I handed it back, but he made a gesture of warding it off and after a brief silence, he said, “What do you think about all this, Mr. Puleo?”.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. St. Martin’s Press, 1988.)

Candle in a Cosmic Wind

Candle in a Cosmic Wind

By Joseph Manzione

When the war began, she had been in an American wing command bunker in the missile fields northwest of Omaha. She was a major in the R.V.S.N, the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, and her own rocket regimental complex, a group of RS-21 launchers outside of Novosibirsk, already had been dismantled under the detailed provisions of U.N. Resolution 242. The Ministry of Defense could think of no better qualifications nor more sensitive postings for professional orphans like Avdotya, so she and thousands of others – R.V.S.N. technicians, P.V.O. – Strany officers, political commissars, boom-boom submariners and more – were sent to the United States to observe comparable American disarmament under the 242 plan. The American officers at Omaha had tolerated her, just as she had politely ignored Stockwell and Belinda Nhu the ear before. The Americans deactivated systems according to a meticulously negotiated schedule, while Avdotya and four comrades, and a very serious team of U.N. observers from Senegal, simply watched, day after day.

Until Ben Kimball had slammed down the blue phone on his desk in the operations center, pointed a pistol in Avdotya`s face, and given a launch-sequence order to the remaining Peackeeper II missile crews on line. In the ensuing shouting and confusion, the reporter from Izvestia – a KGB operative – garroted a young American guard and grabbed her automatic weapon. The Senegalese died quickly, as did the reporter and three American technicians, but Avdotya and her two remaining comrades managed to break out through a light cordon of bewildered guards. Not knowing what to do, they ran through endless corridors pursued by the Americans, and Avdotya lost the P.V.O. Strany Pilot first, and later the boy from the embassy. She had taken to the airducts then, and eventually found herself outside the main generator bunker and the underground fuels and stockpiles depot. She killed three guards and managed to barricade herself in that section before they found her, but by then the short war was almost over, and circumstances had changed. The generation of power in a protected environment was paramount, and she controlled supplies, machines, and computers. Despite the desperate efforts of the surviving Americans in the weeks that followed, they were not able to flush her out.

Candle in a Cosmic Wind. Picture by Elena.

Above ground, the world appeared to die very quickly. Avodtya resigned herself to a life spent in a safe cage; there was enough of everything to sustain her body, but her emotional suffering was unavoidable. By the third years, however, the permafrost reached far below the bunker and the huge fuel tanks embedded in the earth around it. Inside the tanks the heating elements could no longer cope with the extreme temperatures, and the fuel slowly congealed into a molasses-like gel that could not be pumped. She foresaw these consequences, and though she could do nothing about them, she took steps to make a temporary escape. She selected a huge all-terrain diesel tractor, building in heating systems, generators and charging circuits, insulated armor and meshed treads. She stowed food and water in the trunk, and a vast amount of fuel in electrically-heated tanks. Two weeks before she was ready, the main generator shut down, and she fought the encroaching frost with portable burners. She barely managed it, but she was already dead.

The days of her life were counted by the fuel gauges on the trucks instrument panels.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. St. Martin’s Press, 1988.)

The Faithful Companion at Forty

The Faithful Companion at Forty

By Kern Joy Fowler

Does he hear me? About like always. “I figured it out,” he says. “It’s a combination of biofeedback and the mantra “home”. I’ve been working and working on it. I could always leave, you know, that was never the problem, but I could never arrive. Something outside me stopped to say something, but I’m too pissed. He goes on. “Am I getting too theoretical for you? Because I’m about to get more so. Try to stay with me. The key word is displacement.” He says this like he’s shivering. “I couldn’t get back because there was no room for me there. The only way back is through an exchange. Someone else has to come forward.”

He pauses again and this pause goes on and on. Finally I grunt. A redskin sound. Noncommittal.

His voice is severe. “This is too important for you to miss just because you’re sulking about god knows what, pilgrim,” he says. “This is travel through space and time.”

“This is baloney,” I tell him. I’m uncharacteristically blunt, blunter ahan I ever was during the primal-scream-return-to-the womb period. If noboy’s listening, what does it matter?

“Displacement,” he repeats and his voice is all still and important. “Ask yourself, buddy, what happened to the buffalo?”

The Faifulth Companion at Forty. Photo by Elena

I don’t believe I’ve heard him correctly. “Say what?

“Return with me,” he says and then he’s gone for good and this time he hasn’t hung up the phone; this time I can still hear the William Tell Overture repeating the hoofbeat part. There’s a noise out front so I go to the door, and damned if I don’t have a buffalo, shuffling around on my ornamental strawberries, looking surprised. “You call this grass?” it asks me. It looks up and down the street, more and more alarmed. “Where’s the plains, man?” Where’s the railroad?”

So I’m happy for him. Really I am.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. St. Martin’s Press, 1988.)

The Cambist and Lord Iron

The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics

By Daniel Abraham

(The Year’s Best Phantasy and Horror, 2008)

Lord Iron opened his hand in a motion of deference. Olaf cleared his throat.

“Wealth,” he said, “is not a measure of money. It is a measure of well-being. Of happiness, if you will. Wealth is not traded, but rather is generated by trade. If you have a piece of art that I wish to own and I have money that you would prefer to the artwork, we trade. Each of us has something he prefers to the thing he gave away; otherwise, we would not have agreed on the trade. We are both better off. You see? Wealth is generated. »

« I believe I can follow you so far, » Lord Iron said. “Certainly I can agree that a flat wallet is no quarantor of contentment.”

“Very well. I considered your problem for the better part of the day. I confess I came near to despairing; there is good data from which to work. But then I found my error. I assumed that your soul, my lord, was valuable. Clearly it is not.”

Lord Iron coughed out something akin to laugh, shock in his expression. Olaf raised a hand, palm out, asking that he not interrupt.

Zombie Boy. Why would Satan bother to buy your soul? He has rights to it already. Photograph by Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

“You are renowned for your practice of evil. This very evening, walking through your house, I have seen things for which I can imagine no proper penance. Why would Satan bother to buy your soul? He has rights to it already.”

“He does,” Lord Iron said, staring into the middle distance.

“And so I saw,” Olaf said. “You aren’t seeking to sell a soul. You are hoping to buy one.”

Lord Iron sighed and looked at his hands. He seemed smaller now. Not a supernatural being, but a man driven by human fears and passions to acts that could only goad him on to worse and worse actions. A man like any other, but with the wealth to magnify his error into the scale of legend.

“You are correct, boy,” he said. “The angels wouldn’t have my soul if I drenched it in honey. I have… treated it poorly. It’s left me weary and sick. I am a waste of flesh. I know that. If there is no way to become a better man than this, I suspect the best path is to become a corpse.”

“I understand, my lord. Here is the answer to your question: the price of a soul is a life of humility and service.”

“Ah, is that all,” Lord Iron said, as if the cambist had suggested that he pull down the stars with his fingers.

“And as it happens,” Olaf went on, “I have one such with which I would be willing to part.”

Lord Iron met his gaze, began to laugh, and then went silent.

“Here,” Olaf said, “is what I propose…”

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

By Karen Russell

In October, the men and women of Sorento harvest the primofiore, or « first fruit,» the most succulent lemons; in March, the yellow bianchetti ripen, followed in June by the green verdelli. In every season you can find me sitting at my bench, watching them fall. Only one or two lemons tumble from the branches each hour, but I’ve been sitting here so long their falling seems contiguous, close as raindrops. My wife has no patience for this sort of meditation. “Jesus Christ, Clyde,” she said. “You need a hobby. »

Most people mistake me for a small, kindly Italian grandfather, a nonno. I have an old nonno’s coloring., the dark walnut stain peculiar to Southern Italians, a tan that won’t fade until I die (which I never will). I wear a neat periwinkle shirt, a canvas sunhat, black suspenders that sag at my chest. My loafers are battered but always polished. The few visitors to the lemon grove who notice me smile blankly into my raisin face and catch the whiff of some sort of tragedy; they whisper that I am a widower, or an old man who survived the children. They never guess that I am a vampire.

Vampire in the Lemon Grove. Photo : Elena

San Francisca’s Lemon Grove, where I spend my days and nights, what part of a Jesuit convent in the 1800s. Now it’s privately owned by the Alberty family, the prices are excessive, and the locals know to buy their lemons elsewhere. In summers a teenage girl named Fila manages a wooden stall at the back of the grove. She’s painfully thin, with heavy black bangs. I can tell by the careful way she saves the best lemons for me, slyly kicking them under my bench, that she knows I am a monster. Sometimes she’ll smile vacantly in my direction, but she never gives me any trouble. And because of her benevolent indifference to me, I feel a swell of love for the girl.

Fila makes the lemonade and monitors the hot dog machine, watching the meat rotate on wire spits. I’m fascinated by this machine. The Italian name for it translates as “carousel of beef”. Who would have guessed at such a device two hundred years ago? Back then we were all preoccupied with visions of apocalypse; Santa Francisca, the foundress of this very grove, googles out her eyes while dictating premonitions of fire. What a shame, I often think that she foresaw only the end times, never hot dogs.

A sign posted just outside the grove reads: Cigarette Pie. Hot dogs. Granite Drinks. Santa Francisca’s Limonata – The most refreshing drank on the planet.