The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 3

  LUCIUS SHEPARD

  R & R

  Lucius Shepard began publishing in 1983, and in a very short time has become one of the most popular and prolific new writers to enter the science fiction field in many years. In 1985, Shepard won the John W. Campbell Award as the year’s best new writer, as well as being on the Nebula Award final ballot an unprecedented three times in three separate categories. Since then, he has turned up several more times on the final Nebula ballot, as well as being a finalist for the Hugo Award, the British Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the World Fantasy Award. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Universe, and elsewhere. His acclaimed first novel, Green Eyes, was an Ace Special. Upcoming is a major new novel, Life During Wartime, from Bantam’s New Fiction line, and a collection, The Jaguar Hunter, from Arkham House. His stories “Salvador” and “Black Coral” were in our Second Annual Collection, and his stories “The Jaguar Hunter” and “A Spanish Lesson” were in our Third Annual Collection. He is currently at work on two new novels, Mister Right and The End of Life as We Know It, and is living somewhere in the back country in Alaska, with no fixed address.

  Shepard has become known for powerful, hard-hitting, sometimes controversial work, but “R & R” is unusually powerful even for Shepard. It is probably his best story to date … and quite likely the single best story to appear in the genre this year.

  R & R

  Lucius Shepard

  1

  One of the new Sikorsky gunships, an element of the First Air Cavalry with the words Whispering Death painted on its side, gave Mingolla and Gilbey and Baylor a lift from the Ant Farm to San Francisco de Juticlan, a small town located inside the green zone which on the latest maps was designated Free Occupied Guatemala. To the east of this green zone lay an undesignated band of yellow that crossed the country from the Mexican border to the Caribbean. The Ant Farm was a firebase on the eastern edge of the yellow band, and it was from there that Mingolla—an artillery specialist not yet twenty-one years old—lobbed shells into an area which the maps depicted in black and white terrain markings. And thus it was that he often thought of himself as engaged in a struggle to keep the world safe for primary colors.

  Mingolla and his buddies could have taken their r&r in Rió or Caracas, but they had noticed that the men who visited these cities had a tendency to grow careless upon their return; they understood from this that the more exuberant your r&r, the more likely you were to wind up a casualty, and so they always opted for the lesser distractions of the Guatemalan towns. They were not really friends: they had little in common, and under different circumstances they might well have been enemies. But taking their r&r together had come to be a ritual of survival, and once they had reached the town of their choice, they would go their separate ways and perform further rituals. Because they had survived so much already, they believed that if they continued to perform these same rituals they would complete their tours unscathed. They had never acknowledged their belief to one another, speaking of it only obliquely—that, too, was part of the ritual—and had this belief been challenged they would have admitted its irrationality; yet they would also have pointed out that the strange character of the war acted to enforce it.

  The gunship set down at an airbase a mile west of town, a cement strip penned in on three sides by barracks and offices, with the jungle rising behind them. At the center of the strip another Sikorsky was practicing take-offs and landings—a drunken, camouflage-colored dragonfly—and two others were hovering overhead like anxious parents. As Mingolla jumped out a hot breeze fluttered his shirt. He was wearing civvies for the first time in weeks, and they felt flimsy compared to his combat gear; he glanced around, nervous, half-expecting an unseen enemy to take advantage of his exposure. Some mechanics were lounging in the shade of a chopper whose cockpit had been destroyed, leaving fanglike shards of plastic curving from the charred metal. Dusty jeeps trundled back and forth between the buildings; a brace of crisply starched lieutenants were making a brisk beeline toward a fork-lift stacked high with aluminum coffins. Afternoon sunlight fired dazzles on the seams and handles of the coffins, and through the heat haze the distant line of barracks shifted like waves in a troubled olive-drab sea. The incongruity of the scene—its What’s-Wrong-With-This-Picture mix of the horrid and the common place—wrenched at Mingolla. His left hand trembled, and the light seemed to grow brighter, making him weak and vague. He leaned against the Sikorsky’s rocket pod to steady himself. Far above, contrails were fraying in the deep blue range of the sky: XL-16s off to blow holes in Nicaragua. He stared after them with something akin to longing, listening for their engines, but heard only the spacy whisper of the Sikorskys.

  Gilbey hopped down from the hatch that led to the computer deck behind the cockpit; he brushed imaginary dirt from his jeans and sauntered over to Mingolla and stood with hands on hips: a short muscular kid whose blond crewcut and petulant mouth gave him the look of a grumpy child. Baylor stuck his head out of the hatch and worriedly scanned the horizon. Then he, too, hopped down. He was tall and rawboned, a couple of years older than Mingolla, with lank black hair and pimply olive skin and features so sharp that they appeared to have been hatcheted into shape. He rested a hand on the side of the Sikorsky, but almost instantly, noticing that he was touching the flaming letter W in Whispering Death, he jerked the hand away as if he’d been scorched. Three days before there had been an all-out assault on the Ant Farm, and Baylor had not recovered from it. Neither had Mingolla. It was hard to tell whether or not Gilbey had been affected.

  One of the Sikorsky’s pilots cracked the cockpit door. “Y’all can catch a ride into ’Frisco at the PX,” he said, his voice muffled by the black bubble of his visor. The sun shined a white blaze on the visor, making it seem that the helmet contained night and a single star.

  “Where’s the PX?” asked Gilbey.

  The pilot said something too muffled to be understood.

  “What?” said Gilbey.

  Again the pilot’s response was muffled, and Gilbey became angry. “Take that damn thing off!” he said.

  “This?” The pilot pointed to his visor. “What for?”

  “So I can hear what the hell you sayin’.”

  “You can hear now, can’tcha?”

  “Okay,” said Gilbey, his voice tight. “Where’s the goddamn PX?”

  The pilot’s reply was unintelligible; his faceless mask regarded Gilbey with inscrutable intent.

  Gilbey balled up his fists. “Take that son of a bitch off!”

  “Can’t do it, soldier,” said the second pilot, leaning over so that the two black bubbles were nearly side by side. “These here doobies”—he tapped his visor—“they got micro-circuits that beams shit into our eyes. ’Fects the optic nerve. Makes it so we can see the beaners even when they undercover. Longer we wear ’em, the better we see.”

  Baylor laughed edgily, and Gilbey said, “Bull!” Mingolla naturally assumed that the pilots were putting Gilbey on, or else their reluctance to remove the helmets stemmed from a superstition, perhaps from a deluded belief that the visors actually did bestow special powers. But given a war in which combat drugs were issued and psychics predicted enemy movements, anything was possible, even micro-circuits that enhanced vision.

  “You don’t wanna see us, nohow,” said the first pilot. “The beams mess up our faces. We’re deformed-lookin’ mothers.”

  “’Course you might not notice the changes,” said the second pilot. “Lotsa people don’t. But if you did, it’d mess you up.”

  Imagining the pilots’ deformities sent a sick chill mounting from Mingolla’s stomach. Gilbey, however, wasn’t buying it. “You think I’m stupid?” he shouted, his neck reddening.

  “Naw,” said the first pilot. “We can see you ain’t stupid. We can see lotsa stuff other people can’t, ’cause of the beams.”

  “A
ll kindsa weird stuff,” chipped in the second pilot. “Like souls.”

  “Ghosts.”

  “Even the future.”

  “The future’s our best thing,” said the first pilot. “You guys wanna know what’s ahead, we’ll tell you.”

  They nodded in unison, the blaze of sunlight sliding across both visors: two evil robots responding to the same program.

  Gilbey lunged for the cockpit door. The first pilot slammed it shut, and Gilbey pounded on the plastic, screaming curses. The second pilot flipped a switch on the control console, and a moment later his amplified voice boomed out: “Make straight past that fork-lift ’til you hit the barracks. You’ll run right into the PX.”

  It took both Mingolla and Baylor to drag Gilbey away from the Sikorsky, and he didn’t stop shouting until they drew near the fork-lift with its load of coffins: a giant’s treasure of enormous silver ingots. Then he grew silent and lowered his eyes. They wangled a ride with an MP corporal outside the PX, and as the jeep hummed across the cement, Mingolla glanced over at the Sikorsky that had transported them. The two pilots had spread a canvas on the ground, had stripped to shorts and were sunning themselves. But they had not removed their helmets. The weird juxtaposition of tanned bodies and shiny black heads disturbed Mingolla, reminding him of an old movie in which a guy had gone through a matter transmitter along with a fly and had ended up with the fly’s head on his shoulders. Maybe, he thought, the helmets were like that, impossible to remove. Maybe the war had gotten that strange.

  The MP corporal noticed him watching the pilots and let out a barking laugh. “Those guys,” he said, with the flat emphatic tone of a man who knew whereof he spoke, “are fuckin’ nuts!”

  * * *

  Six years before, San Francisco de Juticlan had been a scatter of thatched huts and concrete block structures deployed among palms and banana leaves on the east bank of the Rió Dulce, at the junction of the river and a gravel road that connected with the Pan American Highway; but it had since grown to occupy substantial sections of both banks, increased by dozens of bars and brothels: stucco cubes painted all the colors of the rainbow, with a fantastic bestiary of neon signs mounted atop their tin roofs. Dragons; unicorns; fiery birds; centaurs. The MP corporal told Mingolla that the signs were not advertisements but coded symbols of pride; for example, from the representation of a winged red tiger crouched amidst green lilies and blue crosses, you could deduce that the owner was wealthy, a member of a Catholic secret society, and ambivalent toward government policies. Old signs were constantly being dismantled, and larger, more ornate ones erected in their stead as testament to improved profits, and this warfare of light and image was appropriate to the time and place, because San Francisco de Juticlan was less a town than a symptom of war. Though by night the sky above it was radiant, at ground level it was mean and squalid. Pariah dogs foraged in piles of garbage, hardbitten whores spat from the windows, and according to the corporal, it was not unusual to stumble across a corpse, probably a victim of the gangs of abandoned children who lived in the fringes of the jungle. Narrow streets of tawny dirt cut between the bars, carpeted with a litter of flattened cans and feces and broken glass; refugees begged at every corner, displaying burns and bullet wounds. Many of the buildings had been thrown up with such haste that their walls were tilted, their roofs canted, and this made the shadows they cast appear exaggerated in their jaggedness, like shadows in the work of a psychotic artist, giving visual expression to a pervasive undercurrent of tension. Yet as Mingolla moved along, he felt at ease, almost happy. His mood was due in part to his hunch that it was going to be one hell of an r&r (he had learned to trust his hunches); but it mainly spoke to the fact that towns like this had become for him a kind of afterlife, a reward for having endured a harsh term of existence.

  The corporal dropped them off at a drugstore, where Mingolla bought a box of stationery, and then they stopped for a drink at the Club Demonio: a tiny place whose whitewashed walls were shined to faint phosphorescence by the glare of purple light bulbs dangling from the ceiling like radioactive fruit. The club was packed with soldiers and whores, most sitting at tables around a dance floor not much bigger than a kingsize mattress. Two couples were swaying to a ballad that welled from a jukebox encaged in chicken wire and two-by-fours; veils of cigarette smoke drifted with underwater slowness above their heads. Some of the soldiers were mauling their whores, and one whore was trying to steal the wallet of a soldier who was on the verge of passing out; her hand worked between his legs, encouraging him to thrust his hips forward, and when he did this, with her other hand she pried at the wallet stuck in the back pocket of his tight-fitting jeans. But all the action seemed listless, half-hearted, as if the dimness and syrupy music had thickened the air and were hampering movement. Mingolla took a seat at the bar. The bartender glanced at him inquiringly, his pupils becoming cored with purple reflections, and Mingolla said, “Beer.”

  “Hey, check that out!” Gilbey slid onto an adjoining stool and jerked his thumb toward a whore at the end of the bar. Her skirt was hiked to mid-thigh, and her breasts, judging by their fullness and lack of sag, were likely the product of elective surgery.

  “Nice,” said Mingolla, disinterested. The bartender set a bottle of beer in front of him, and he had a swig; it tasted sour, watery, like a distillation of the stale air.

  Baylor slumped onto the stool next to Gilbey and buried his face in his hands. Gilbey said something to him that Mingolla didn’t catch, and Baylor lifted his head. “I ain’t goin’ back,” he said.

  “Aw, Jesus!” said Gilbey. “Don’t start that crap.”

  In the half-dark Baylor’s eye sockets were clotted with shadows. His stare locked onto Mingolla. “They’ll get us next time,” he said. “We should head downriver. They got boats in Livingston that’ll take you to Panama.”

  “Panama!” sneered Gilbey. “Nothin’ there ’cept more beaners.”

  “We’ll be okay at the Farm,” offered Mingolla. “Things get too heavy, they’ll pull us back.”

  “‘Too heavy?’” A vein throbbed in Baylor’s temple. “What the fuck you call ‘too heavy?’”

  “Screw this!” Gilbey heaved up from his stool. “You deal with him, man,” he said to Mingolla; he gestured at the big-breasted whore. “I’m gonna climb Mount Silicon.”

  “Nine o’clock,” said Mingolla. “The PX. Okay?”

  Gilbey said, “Yeah,” and moved off. Baylor took over his stool and leaned close to Mingolla. “You know I’m right,” he said in an urgent whisper. “They almost got us this time.”

  “Air Cav’ll handle ’em,” said Mingolla, affecting nonchalance. He opened the box of stationery and unclipped a pen from his shirt pocket.

  “You know I’m right,” Baylor repeated.

  Mingolla tapped the pen against his lips, pretending to be distracted.

  “Air Cav!” said Baylor with a despairing laugh. “Air Cav ain’t gonna do squat!”

  “Why don’t you put on some decent tunes?” Mingolla suggested. “See if they got any Prowler on the box.”

  “Dammit!” Baylor grabbed his wrist. “Don’t you understand, man? This shit ain’t workin’ no more!”

  Mingolla shook him off. “Maybe you need some change,” he said coldly; he dug out a handful of coins and tossed them on the counter. “There! There’s some change.”

  “I’m tellin’ you…”

  “I don’t wanna hear it!” snapped Mingolla.

  “You don’t wanna hear it?” said Baylor, incredulous. He was on the verge of losing control. His dark face slick with sweat, one eyelid fluttering. He pounded the countertop for emphasis. “Man, you better hear it! ’Cause we don’t pull somethin’ together soon, real soon, we’re gonna die! You hear that, don’tcha?”

  Mingolla caught him by the shirtfront. “Shut up!”

  “I ain’t shuttin’ up!” Baylor shrilled. “You and Gilbey, man, you think you can save your ass by stickin’ your head in the sand. But I’m gonna
make you listen.” He threw back his head, his voice rose to a shout. “We’re gonna die!”

  The way he shouted it—almost gleefully, like a kid yelling a dirty word to spite his parents—pissed Mingolla off. He was sick of Baylor’s scenes. Without planning it, he punched him, pulling the punch at the last instant. Kept a hold of his shirt and clipped him on the jaw, just enough to rock back his head. Baylor blinked at him, stunned, his mouth open. Blood seeped from his gums. At the opposite end of the counter, the bartender was leaning beside a choirlike arrangement of liquor bottles, watching Mingolla and Baylor, and some of the soldiers were watching, too: they looked pleased, as if they had been hoping for a spot of violence to liven things up. Mingolla felt debased by their attentiveness, ashamed of his bullying. “Hey, I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I…”