The Pardoner’s Tale

The Pardoner’s Tale

By Robert Silverberg

The wall that encircles L.A. is 100, 150 feet thick. Its gates are more like tunnels. When you consider that the wall runs completely around the L.A. basin, from the San Gabriel Valley to the San Fernando Valley and then over the mountains and down the coast and back the far side past Long Beach, and that it’s at least 60 feet high and all that distance deep, you can begin to appreciate the mass of it. Think of the phenomenal expenditure of human energy that went into building it – muscle and sweat, sweat and muscle. I think about that a lot.

I suppose the walls around our cities were put there mostly as symbols. They highlight the distinction between city and countryside, between citizen and uncitizen, between control and chaos, just as city walls did 5000 years ago. But mainly they serve to remind us that we are all slaves nowadays. You can’t ignore the walls. You can’t pretend they aren’t there. We made you build us, is what they say, and don’t you ever forget that. All the same, Chicago doesn’t have a wall 60 feet high and 150 feet thick. Houston doesn’t Phoenix doesn’t. They make do with less. But L.A, is the main city. I suppose the Los Angeles Wall is a statement: I am the Big Cheese. I am the Ham What Am.

Pardoner's Tale. Photo by Elena

The walls aren’t there because the Entities are afraid of attack. They know how invulnerable they are. We know it, too. They just want to decorate their capital with something a little special. What the hell, it isn’t their sweat that goes into building the walls. It’s ours. Not mine personally, of course. But ours.

I saw a few Entities walking around just inside the wall, preoccupied, as usual, with God knows what and paying no attention to the humans in the vicinity. These were low-caste ones, the kind with the luminous orange spots along their sides. I gave them plenty of room. They have a way sometimes of picking a human up with those long elastic tongues, like a frog snapping up a fly, and letting him dangle in mid-air while they study him with those saucer-sized yellow eyes. I don’t care for that. You don’t get hurt, but it isn’t agreeable to be dangled in mid-air by something that looks like a 15-foot high purple squid standing on the tips of its tentacles. Happened to me once in St. Louis, long ago, and I’m, in no hurry to have it happen again.

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

Glass Cloud

Glass Cloud

By James Patrick Kelly

The Messanger’s mission on Islington Street sprawled over an entire block, an unholy jumble of architectural afterthoughts appended to the simple neogothic chapel that had once been the Church of the Holy Spiriti. There was a Victorian rectory, a squat brick-façade parochial school built in the 1950s, and an eclectic auditorium that dated from the oughts. The fortunes of the congregation dad since declined and the complex had been abandoned, successfully confounding local redevelopers until the Messangers bought it. The initiates of norther New England’s first mission had added an underground bike lockup, washed the stained glass, repaired the rotted clapboards, and planted an arborvitae screen around the auditorium and still Wing thought it was the ugliest building in Portsmouth.

In the years immediately after first contact there had been no contact at all with the masses; complex and secret negotiations continues between the Messengers and various political and industrial interests. Once the deals were struck, however, the aliens had moved swiftly to open missions for the propagation of the message, apparently a strange brew of technophilic materialism and zen-like self-effacement, of the message was a closely held secret; the Messengers would neither confirm nor deny the reports of those few initiates who left the missions.

Glass Cloud. Photo : Elena

Wing hesitated at the wide granite steps leading to the chapel; they were slick from a spring ice storm. Freshly sprinkled salt was melting holes in the ice and there was a shovel propped against one of the massive oak doors. It was five-thirty in the morning – too early for protesters. No one inside would be expecting visitors, which was fine with Wing: he wanted to surprise the Messenger. But the longer he stood, the less certain he was of whether he was going in. He looked up at the eleven stone apostles arranges across the tympanum. Tiny stylized flames danced over their heads, representing the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. He could not read the apostles expressions; acid rain had smudged their faces. Wing felt a little smudged himself. He reached into his back pocket for the flask. He took a swig and found new courage as a whiskey flame danced down his throat. He staggered into the church – twisted in the good old-fashioned way and too tired to resist Ndavu anymore.

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

The Evening and the Morning and the Night

The Evening and the Morning and the Night

By Octavia E. Butler

Biology. School was a pain in the usual ways. I didn’t eat in public anymore, didn’t like the way people stared at my biscuits – cleverly dubbed “dog biscuits” in every school I’d ever attended. You’d think university students would be more creative. I didn’t like the way people edged away from me when they caught sight of my emblem. I’d begun wearing it on a chain around my neck and putting it down inside my blouse, but people managed to notice it anyway. People who don’t eat in public, who drink nothing more interesting than water, who smoke nothing at all – people like that are suspicious. Or rather, they make other suspicious. Sooner or later, one of those others, finding my fingers and wrists bare, would fake an interest in my chain. That would be that. I couldn’t hide the emblem in my purse. If anything happened to me, medical people had to see it in time to avoid giving me the medications they might use on a normal person. It isn’t just ordinary food we have to avoid, but about a quarter of a Physicians’ Desk Reference of widely used drugs. Every now and then there are news stories about people who stopped carrying their emblems – probably trying to pass as normal. Then they have an accident. By the time anyone realizes there is anything wrong, it’s too late. So I wore my emblem. And one way or another, people got a look at it or got the word from someone who had. “She is!” Yeah!

A girl. Illustration by Elena

At the beginning of my third year, four other DGDs and I decided to rent a house together. We’d all had enough of being lepers twenty-four hours a day. There was an English major. He wanted to be a writer and tell our story from the inside – which had only been done thirty or forty times before. There was a special-education major who hoped the handicapped would accept her more readily than the able-bodied, a premed who planned to go into research, and a chemistry major who didn’t really know what she wanted to do.

Two men and three women. All we had in common was our disease, plus a weird combination of stubborn intensity about whatever we happened to be doing and hopeless cynicism about everything else. Healthy people say no one can concentrate like a DGD. Healthy people have all the time in the world for stupid generalizations and short attention spans.

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

Night of the Cooters

Night of the Cooters

By Howard Waldrop

“We was watching, and these damn things started coming out – they looked like big old leather balls, big as horses, with snakes all out the front – “

“What?”

“Snakes. Yeah, tentacles Leo called them, like an octy-puss. Leo’d come back from town and was there when them boogers came out. Martians he said they was, things from Mars. They had big old eyes, big as your head. Everybody was pushing and shoving; then one of them pulled out one of them gun things, real slow like, and just started burning up everything in sight.

“We all ran back for whatever cover we could find – it took ‘em a while to get up the dirt pile. They killed horses, dogs, anything they could see. Fire was everywhere. They use that thing just like the volunteer firemen use them water hoses in Waco!”

“Where’s Leo?”

Sweets pointed to the draw that ran diagonally on the west. “We watched awhile, finally figured they couldn’t line up on the ditch all the way to the rise. Leo and the others got away up the draw – he was gonna telegraph the university about it. The bunch that got away was supposed to send people out to the town road to warn people. You probably would have run into them if you hadn’t been coming from Theobald’s place. Anyway, soon as them things saw people were getting’ away, they got mad as horners. That’s when they lit up the Atkinson’s barn.”

Night of the Cooters. Photo by Elena

A flash of fire leapt in the roots of the tree, jumped back thirty feet into the burnt grass behind them, then moved back and forth in a curtain of sparks.

“Man, that’s what I call a real smoke pole,” said Luke.

“Well,” Lindley said, “This won’t do. These things done attacked citizens in my jurisdiction, and they killed my horse.”

He turned to Luke.

“Be real careful, and get back to town, and get the posse up. Telegraph the rangers and tell’em burn leather getting here. Then get aholt of Skip Whitworeth and have him bring out The Gun.”

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

Angel

Angel

By Pat Cadigan

But have a face, I said. You’ve always had a face.

I’m different, said the Angel.

You sure are, I thought, looking at him. Angel had a beautiful face. That wasn’t why I took him home that night, just because he was there, his beauty. The way you think of a man being beautiful, good clean lines, deep-set eyes, ageless. About the only way you could describe him – look away and you’d forget everything except that he was beautiful. But he did have a face. He did.

Angel shifted in the chair – these were like somebody’s old kitchen chairs, you couldn’t get too comfortable in them – and shook his head, because he knew I was thinking troubled thoughts. Sometimes you could think something and it wouldn’t be troubled and later you’d think the same thing and it would be troubled. The Angel didn’t like me to be troubled about him.

Do you have a cigarette? I asked.

I think so.

St. Andrew United Church, 117 Bloor street, Toronto. Photo by Elena

I patted my jacket and came up with most of a pack that I handed over to him. The Angel lit up and amused us both by having the smoke come out his ears and trickle out of his eyes like ghostly tears. I felt my own eyes watering for his; I wiped them and there was that stuff again, but from me now. I was crying silver fireworks. I flicked them on the table and watched them puff out and vanish.

Does this mean I’m getting to be you, now? I asked.

Angel shook his head. Smoke wafted out of his hair. Just thing rubbing off on you. Because we’ve been together and you’re – susceptible. But they’re different for you.

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