Year's Best Scifi 2 Part 38

Emery glanced at him. "The first time you tried that, she hadn't learned to use it. She was a lot better when she shot me. Next time she'll be better yet. Am I making myself clear?"

Brook nodded. "I've got to be careful."

"You've got to be more than just careful," Emery told him, "because if you're not, you're going to die. I was ten feet or more from her when she shot at me, and backing away. She fired anyway, and she hit me."

"I got it."

"When you dressed my wound," Emery continued, "you said that if her shot had been an inch or two lower it would have hit my belt. If it had been an inch or two to the left, it would have killed me. Did you think of that?"

"Sure. I just didn't want to say it." Brook pointed to a small dark building. "There's the last store, Rothschild's Records and CDs. It's pretty good. I used to have you drop me there sometimes when you were going into town, remember?"

Intent upon his thoughts and, the snow-covered road, Emery did not even nod.

"Those girls have got to be either camping or living in somebody's cabin out here. If we can find out where, we could get some guns when the town's open again and go out there and make them give our stuff back."

Emery muttered, "This is the last trip until the county clears the road."

"We're doing okay now."

"This is a state highway. It's been plowed at least once, most likely within the past couple of hours. The road to the cabin won't have been plowed at all, and we barely made it out."

"I'd like to look at the other car and see if they left any of my stuff."

"All right, if we can drive as far as the cabin, we'll do that. But after that, I'm not taking the jeep out untilthe road's been plowed."

"They really were girls? I thought you and 'Leen might have been stringing Jan."

"Two of them were." Emery studied the road. "The one who shot me, and another one who was with her.

I imagine the third was as well, she seemed to be about the same size."

Brook nodded to himself. "You never can tell what girls are going to do, I guess."

"Obviously it's harder to predict the actions of someone whose psychology differs from your own. Once you've learned what a woman values, though, you ought to be right most of the time-say, seven out of ten." Emery chuckled. "How's that for a man being divorced for the second time? Do I sound like an expert?"

"Sure. What does a woman value?"

"It varies from woman to woman, and sometimes it changes. You have to learn for each, or guess. With a little experience you ought to be able to make pretty good guesses after you've talked with the woman for a few minutes. You've got to listen to what she says; and listen harder for what she doesn't. All this is true for men as well, of course. Fortunately, men are easier-for other men."

"Okay if I throw you a softball, Dad? I'm leading up to something."

"Go ahead."

"What does Jan value?"

"First of all, the appearance of wealth. She doesn't value money itself, but she wants to impress people with her big car, her mink coat, and so on. Have I missed the turn?"

"I don't think so. We've been going pretty slow."

"I don't either-I don't see how I could have-but I keep worrying about it.

"Money has a poetry of its own, Brook. Women are fond of telling us that we don't get it, but the poetry of money is one of the things that they rarely get. One of a dozen or more, I suppose. Are you going to ask why I married Jan? Is that what you're leading up to?"

"Uh-huh. Why did you?"

"Because I was lonely and fell in love with her. Looking back, I can see very clearly that I wanted to prove to myself that I could make a woman happy, too. I felt I could make Jan happy, and I was right.

But after a while-after I lost the company, particularly-it no longer seemed worth the effort."

"I'm with you. Did she love you too? Or did you think she did?"

Emery sighed. "Women don't love in the same way that men do, Brook. I said the psychology was different, and that's one of the main differences. Men are dogs: Women are cats-they love conditionally.

For example, I love you. If you were to try to kill me-"

"I wouldn't do that!"

"I'm constructing an extreme example," Emery explained patiently. "Say that I was to try to kill you.

You'd fight me off if you could. You might even kill me doing it. But you'd love me afterward, just the same; you may not think so, but you would."Brook nodded, his face thoughtful.

"When you love a woman, you'll love her in the same way; but women love as long as-as long as you have a good job, as long as you don't bring home your friefids, and so on. You shouldn't blame them for that, because it's as much a part of their natures as the way you love is of yours. For women, love is a spell that can be broken by picking a flower or throwing a ring into the sea. Love is magic, which is why they frequently use the language of fairy tales when they talk about it."

"We're coming up on the turn." Brook aimed his forefinger at the darkness and the blowing snow. "It's right along here someplace."

"About another half mile. Throw your fastball."

"This woman that shot you. Why did she do it?"

"I've been thinking about that."

"I figured you had."

"Why does anyone, robbing someone else, shoot them?"

"No witnesses?"

Emery shook his head. "A thief doesn't merely shoot to silence a witness, he kills. After she had shot me she let me go. I was still conscious, still able to walk and to talk. Perfectly capable of giving the sheriff a description of her. But she let me go. Why?"

"You were there, Dad. What do you think?"

"You're starting to sound like me." Emery slowed the jeep from ten miles an hour to six, searching the road to his left.

"I know."

"Because she was frightened, I think. Afraid of me, and afraid she couldn't do it, too. When she shot me, she proved to herself that she could, and I was able to show her-by my actions, because she couldn't understand what I was saying-that I wasn't somebody she had to be afraid of."

The road to the cabin was deep in snow, so deep that they inched and churned their way through it foot by foot. Caution, and speeds scarcely faster than a walk, soon became habitual, and Emery's mind turned to other things. First of all, to the smoothly oval face behind the threatening muzzle of his rifle.

Large, dark eyes above a tiny mouth narrowed by determination; a small-slightly flattened?-nose.

Small and slender hands; the thirty-thirty had looked big in them, which meant that they had been hardly larger than the twins'. He did not remember seeing hair, but with that face it would be black, surely.

Straight or curled? Not j.a.panese or Chinese, possibly a small, light-complexioned Afro-American. A mixture of Black and White with Oriental? Filipino? Almost anything seemed possible.

The coal-black hair he had imagined merged with the shadow of her hood. "Brownies," he said aloud.

"What?"

"Brownies. Don't they call those little girls who sell cookies Brownies?"

"Sure. Like Girl Scouts, only littler. 'Leen and 'Layna used to be Brownies."Emery nodded. "That's right. I remember." But brownies were originally English fairies, small and dark-brown-faced, presumably-mischievous and sometimes spiteful, but often willing to trade their work for food and clothing. Fairies sufficiently feminine that giving their name to an organization for young girls was not ridiculous, as it would have been to call the same little girls gnomes, for example.

Stolen by fairies, Jan had said, referring to villagers of the eighteen forties.... He tried to remember the precise date, and failed.

Because brownies did not merely trade their labor for the goods they wanted. Often they stole. Milked your cow before you woke up. s.n.a.t.c.hed your infant from its crib. Lured your children to a place where time ran differently, too fast or too slow. Aileen, who had been gone for no more than two hours at most, had thought she had been gone for a day-had been taken to the ziggurat and shown pictures she had not understood, had slept or at least tried to sleep, had been made to wade into the lake, where blue lights shone.

Where was fairyland?

"Why're you stopping?"

"Because I want to get out and look at something. You stay here."

Flashlight in hand, he shut the jeep's flimsy vinyl flap. Later-by next morning, perhaps-the snow might be easier to walk on. Now it was still uncompacted, as light as down; he sank above his knees at every step.

The historical marker protruded above the blank whiteness, its size amplified by the snow it wore. He considered brus.h.i.+ng off the bronze plaque and reading it, but the precise date and circ.u.mstances, as specified by some historian more interested in plausibility than truth, did not matter.

He waded past it, across what would be green and parklike lawn in summer, reminding himself that there was a ditch at its end before the ranch's barbed-wire fence, and wis.h.i.+ng he had a stick or staff with which to probe the snow. The body-if he had in fact seen what he had thought he had seen-would be covered by this time, invisible save as a slight mound.

When he stood in the ditch, the snow was above his waist. His gloved hands found the wire, then the almost-buried locust post, which he used to pull himself up, breaching the snow like some fantastic, red-plaid dolphin.

The coyote lay where he had glimpsed it on the drive to town. It had frozen as stiff as the squirrel it had left him, its face twisted in a snarl of pain and surprise. Negotiating the ditch again with so much difficulty that he feared for a few seconds that he would have to call for Brook to rescue him, he stowed the body on the narrow floor behind the jeep's front seats.

Brook said, "That's a dead coyote."

Emery nodded as he got back behind the wheel and put the jeep in gear. "Cyanide gun."

"What do you want with that?"

"I don't know. I haven't decided yet."

Brook stared, then shrugged. "I hope you didn't start yourself bleeding again, doing all that."

"I may bury him. Or I might have him stuffed and mounted. That sporting-goods dealer has a taxidermyservice. They could do it. Probably wouldn't cost more than a hundred or so."

"You didn't kill it," Brook protested.

"Oh yes, I did," Emery told him.

What they could see of the cabin through the falling snow suggested that it was as they had left it. Emery did not stop, and it would have been difficult to make the jeep push its way through the banks more slowly than it already was. The world before the winds.h.i.+eld was white, framed in black; and upon that blank sheet his mind strove to paint the country from which the small brown women had come, a country that would send forth an aircraft (if the ziggurat in the lake was in fact an aircraft or something like one) crewed by young women more alike than sisters. A country without men, perhaps, or one in which men were hated and feared.

What had they thought of Jan, a woman almost a foot taller than they? Jan with her creamy complexion and yellow hair? Of Aileen and Alayna, girls of their own size, nearly as dark as they, and alike as two peas? The first had run from, the second fought them; and both reactions had quite likely baffled them.

From their own perspective, they had crashed in a wilderness of snow and wind and bitter cold-a howling wilderness strangely and dangerously inhabited.

"We could've stopped at the cabin," Brook said. "We can go look for my stuff tomorrow, when there's daylight."

Emery shook his head. "We wouldn't be able to get through tomorrow. The snow will be too deep."

"We could try."

Brook had presumably confirmed their worst fears, as he had himself; and although they'd had his rifle, they had fled at his approach. They had recognized the rifle as a weapon when they had entered and searched his empty, unlocked cabin-empty because he had seen something flash high up on the hill across the creek....

"Is it much farther, Dad?" Brook was peering through the wind-driven snow into the black night again, trying to catch a glimpse of Jan's Lincoln.

"Quire a bit, I believe." Apologetically, Emery added, "We're not going very fast."

The flash from the hill had left a shallow burn on the oak back of his chair. Had it been a laser-a laser weapon? Had they been shooting at him even then? A laser that could do no more than scorch the surface of the chair back would not kill a man, surely, though it might blind him if it struck his eyes. Not a weapon, perhaps, but a laser tool of some kind that they had tried to employ as a weapon. He recalled the lasers used to engrave steel in the company he had left to found his own.

"n.o.body's in that cabin back there now, I guess."

He shook his head. "Been closed since early November. There's n.o.body out here really, except us and them."

"What do you think they're trying to do out here?"

"Leave." His tone, he hoped, would notify Brook that he was not in the mood for conversation.

"They could've gone in the Lincoln. It wasn't out of gas. I'd been watching the gauge, because she never does.""They can't drive. If they could, they'd have driven it away from the cabin the first time, when Jan left the keys in it. Besides, the Lincoln couldn't take them where they want to go."

"Dad-"

"That's enough questions for now. I'll tell you more when I've got more of it figured out."

"You must be really tired. I wish we'd stopped at the cabin. There won't be any of my stuff left anyhow."

Was he really as tired as Brook suggested? He considered the matter and decided he was. Wading through the snow past the historical marker had consumed what little strength he had left after losing blood and slogging home with Aileen through snow that no longer seemed particularly deep. He was operating now on whatever it was that remained when the last strength was gone. On stubbornness and desperation.

"Your grandfather used to tell a story," he remarked to Brook, "about a jackrabbit, a coyote, and a jay.

Did I ever tell you that?"

"No." Brook grinned, glad that he was not angry. "What is it?"

"A jay will yell and warn the other animals if there's a coyote around. You know that?"

"Uh-huh."

"Well, this jay was up on a mesquite, with a jackrabbit sleeping in the shade. The jay spotted a coyote stalking the jackrabbit and yelled a warning. The coyote sprang, and the jackrabbit ran, scooting past the mesquite and hooking left, with the coyote after it.