The Very Best of F & SF v1 (28 page)

All this, as
Nathan Stack stood watching. He was the last, at the end, and because he had
come to own—if even for a few moments—that which could have been his from the
start, had he but known, he did not sleep but stood and watched. Knowing at
last, at the end, that he had loved and done no wrong.

25

The Deathbird
closed its wings over the Earth until at last, at the end, there was only the
great bird crouched over the dead cinder. Then the Deathbird raised its head to
the star-filled sky and repeated the sigh of loss the Earth had felt at the
end. Then its eyes closed, it tucked its head carefully under its wing, and all
was night.

Far away, the
stars waited for the cry of the Deathbird to reach them so final moments could
be observed at last, at the end, for the race of Men.

26

THIS IS FOR MARK TWAIN

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When “James Tiptree, Jr.” (a pseudonym
of Alice Bradley Sheldon [1915-1987]), first submitted the story “Painwise,”
editor Ed Ferman turned it down for
F&SF
as being too
baffling. Months later, still haunted by the story, he asked to see it again
and bought it unrevised. “Like any original author,” Ursula Le Guin said, “Alii
[Sheldon] did have to teach people how to read Tiptree.” I doubt anyone will
have any such problems with “The Women Men Don’t See”—in this story, Tiptree
used the a Hemingway-esque style of adventure writing to create a classic
extrapolation of life on Earth.

I
see her
first while the Mexicana 727 is
barreling down to Cozumel Island. I come out of the can and lurch into her
seat, saying “Sorry,” at a double female blur. The near blur nods quietly. The
younger blur in the window seat goes on looking out. I continue down the aisle,
registering nothing. Zero. I never would have looked at them or thought of them
again.

Cozumel airport
is the usual mix of panicky Yanks dressed for the sand pile and calm Mexicans
dressed for lunch at the Presidente. I am a gray used-up Yank dressed for
serious fishing; I extract my rods and duffel from the riot and hike across the
field to find my charter pilot. One Captain Estéban has contracted to deliver
me to the bonefish flats of Belize three hundred kilometers down the coast.

Captain Estéban
turns out to be four feet nine of mahogany Maya
puro.
He is also in a
somber Maya snit. He tells me my Cessna is grounded somewhere and his Bonanza
is booked to take a party to Chetumal.

Well, Chetumal
is south; can he take me along and go on to Belize after he drops them?
Gloomily he concedes the possibility—
if
the other party permits, and
if
there are not too many
equipajes.

The Chetumal
party approaches. It’s the woman and her young companion
—daughter?—neatly
picking their way across the gravel and yucca apron. Their Ventura two-suiters,
like themselves, are small, plain, and neutral-colored. No problem. When the
captain asks if I may ride along, the mother says mildly, “Of course,” without
looking at me.

I think that’s
when my inner tilt-detector sends up its first faint click. How come this woman
has already looked me over carefully enough to accept on her plane? I disregard
it. Paranoia hasn’t been useful in my business for years, but the habit is hard
to break.

As we clamber
into the Bonanza, I see the girl has what could be an attractive body if there
was any spark at all. There isn’t. Captain Estéban folds a serape to sit on so
he can see over the cowling and runs a meticulous check-down. And then we’re up
and trundling over the turquoise Jell-O of the Caribbean into a stiff south
wind.

The coast on our
right is the territory of Quintana Roo. If you haven’t seen Yucatán, imagine
the world’s biggest absolutely flat green-gray rug. An empty-looking land. We
pass the white ruin of Tulum and the gash of the road to
Chichén Itzá
, a half-dozen coconut
plantations, and then nothing but reef and low scrub jungle all the way to the
horizon, just about the way the conquistadors saw it four centuries back.

Long strings of
cumulus are racing at us, shadowing the coast. I have gathered that part of our
pilot’s gloom concerns the weather. A cold front is dying on the henequen
fields of
Mérida
to the west,
and the south wind has piled up a string of coastal storms: what they call
lloviznas.
Estéban detours
methodically around a couple of small thunderheads. The Bonanza jinks, and I
look back with a vague notion of reassuring the women. They are calmly intent
on what can be seen of Yucatán. Well, they were offered the copilot’s view, but
they turned it down. Too shy?

Another
llovizna
puffs up ahead. Estéban
takes the Bonanza upstairs, rising in his seat to sight his course. I relax for
the first time in too long, savoring the latitudes between me and my desk, the
week of fishing ahead. Our captain’s classic Maya profile attracts my gaze:
forehead sloping back from his predatory nose, lips and jaw stepping back below
it. If his slant eyes had been any more crossed, he couldn’t have made his
license. That’s a handsome combination, believe it or not. On the little Maya
chicks in their minishifts with iridescent gloop on those cockeyes, it’s also
highly erotic. Nothing like the oriental doll thing; these people have stone
bones. Captain Estéban’s old grandmother could probably tow the Bonanza....

I’m snapped
awake by the cabin hitting my ear. Estéban is barking into his headset over a
drumming racket of hail; the windows are dark gray.

One important
noise is missing—the motor. I realize Estéban is fighting a dead plane.
Thirty-six hundred; we’ve lost two thousand feet!

He slaps tank
switches as the storm throws us around; I catch something about
gasolina
in a snarl that
shows his big teeth. The Bonanza reels down. As he reaches for an overhead toggle,
I see the fuel gauges are high. Maybe a clogged gravity feed line; I’ve heard
of dirty gas down here. He drops the set; it’s a million to one nobody can read
us through the storm at this range anyway. Twenty-five hundred—going down.

His electric feed
pump seems to have cut in: the motor explodes—quits— explodes—and quits again
for good. We are suddenly out of the bottom of the clouds. Below us is a long
white line almost hidden by rain: the reef. But there isn’t any beach behind
it, only a big meandering bay with a few mangrove flats—and it’s coming up at
us fast.

This is going to
be bad, I tell myself with great unoriginality. The women behind me haven’t
made a sound. I look back and see they’ve braced down with their coats by their
heads. With a stalling speed around eighty, all this isn’t much use, but I
wedge myself in.

Estéban yells
some more into his set, flying a falling plane. He is doing one jesus job,
too—as the water rushes up at us he dives into a hair-raising turn and hangs us
into the wind—with a long pale ridge of sandbar in front of our nose.

Where in hell he
found it I never know. The Bonanza mushes down, and we belly-hit with a
tremendous tearing crash—bounce—hit again—and everything slews wildly as we
flat-spin into the mangroves at the end of the bar. Crash! Clang! The plane is
wrapping itself into a mound of strangler fig with one wing up. The crashing
quits with us all in one piece. And no fire. Fantastic.

Captain Estéban
pries open his door, which is now in the roof. Behind me a woman is repeating
quietly, “Mother. Mother.” I climb up the floor and find the girl trying to
free herself from her mother’s embrace. The woman’s eyes are closed. Then she
opens them and suddenly lets go, sane as soap. Estéban starts hauling them out.
I grab the Bonanza’s aid kit and scramble out after them into brilliant sun and
wind. The storm that hit us is already vanishing up the coast.

“Great landing,
Captain.”

“Oh,
yes!
It was beautiful.” The
women are shaky, but no hysteria. Estéban is surveying the scenery with the
expression his ancestors used on the Spaniards.

If you’ve been
in one of these things, you know the slow-motion inanity that goes on.
Euphoria, first. We straggle down the fig tree and out onto the sandbar in the
roaring hot wind, noting without alarm that there’s nothing but miles of
crystalline water on all sides. It’s only a foot or so deep, and the bottom is
the olive color of silt. The distant shore around us is all flat” mangrove
swamp, totally uninhabitable.

“Bahía Espírito
Santo.” Estéban confirms my guess that we’re down in that huge water
wilderness. I always wanted to fish it.

“What’s all that
smoke?” The girl is pointing at the plumes blowing around the horizon.

“Alligator
hunters,” says Estéban. Maya poachers have left burn-offs in the swamps. It
occurs to me that any signal fires we make aren’t going to be too conspicuous.
And I now note that our plane is well-buried in the mound of fig. Hard to see
it from the air.

Just as the
question of how the hell we get out of here surfaces in my mind, the older
woman asks composedly, “If they didn’t hear you, Captain, when will they start
looking for us? Tomorrow?”

“Correct,” Estéban
agrees dourly. I recall that air-sea rescue is fairly informal here. Like, keep
an eye open for Mario, his mother says he hasn’t been home all week.

It dawns on me
we may be here quite some while.

Furthermore, the
diesel-truck noise on our left is the Caribbean piling back into the mouth of
the bay. The wind is pushing it at us, and the bare bottoms on the mangroves
show that our bar is covered at high tide. I recall seeing a full moon this
morning in—believe it, St. Louis—which means maximal tides. Well, we can climb
up in the plane. But what about drinking water?

There’s a small
splat! behind me. The older woman has sampled the bay. She shakes her head,
smiling ruefully. It’s the first real expression on either of them; I take it
as the signal for introductions. When I say I’m Don Fenton from St. Louis, she
tells me their name is Parsons, from Bethesda, Maryland. She says it so nicely
I don’t at first notice we aren’t being given first names. We all compliment
Captain Estéban again.

His left eye is
swelled shut, an inconvenience beneath his attention as a Maya, but Mrs.
Parsons spots the way he’s bracing his elbow in his ribs.

“You’re hurt,
Captain.”

“Roto
—I think is broken.” He’s embarrassed at being in pain. We get him
to peel off his Jaime shirt, revealing a nasty bruise in his superb dark-bay
torso.

“Is there tape
in that kit, Mr. Fenton? I’ve had a little first-aid training.”

She begins to
deal competently and very impersonally with the tape. Miss Parsons and I wander
to the end of the bar and have a conversation which I am later to recall
acutely.

“Roseate
spoonbills,” I tell her as three pink birds flap away.

“They’re
beautiful,” she says in her tiny voice. They both have tiny voices. “He’s a
Mayan Indian, isn’t he? The pilot, I mean.”

“Right. The
real thing, straight out of the Bonampak murals. Have you seen Chich
é
n and Uxmal?”

“Yes. We were in
Mérida
. We’re going to Tikal in
Guatemala.... I mean, we were.”

“You’ll get
there.” It occurs to me the girl needs cheering up. “Have they told you that
Maya mothers used to tie a board on the infant’s forehead to get that slant?
They also hung a ball of tallow over its nose to make the eyes cross. It was
considered aristocratic.”

She smiles and
takes another peek at Estéban. “People seem different in Yucat
á
n,” she says thoughtfully. “Not
like the Indians around Mexico City. More, I don’t know, independent.”

“Comes from
never having been conquered. Mayas got massacred and chased a lot, but nobody
ever really flattened them. I bet you didn’t know that the last Mexican-Maya
war ended with a negotiated truce in nineteen thirty-five?”

“No!” Then she
says seriously, “I like that.”

“So do I.”

“The water is
really rising very fast,” says Mrs. Parsons gently from behind us.

It is, and so is
another
llovizna.
We climb back into the Bonanza. I try to rig my parka for a rain
catcher, which blows loose as the storm hits fast and furious. We sort a couple
of malt bars and my bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of the jumble in the cabin and
make ourselves reasonably comfortable. The Parsons take a sip of whiskey each, Estéban
and I considerably more. The Bonanza begins to bump soggily. Estéban makes an
ancient one-eyed Mayan face at the water seeping into his cabin and goes to
sleep. We all nap.

When the water
goes down, the euphoria has gone with it, and we’re very, very thirsty. It’s
also damn near sunset. I get to work with a bait-casting rod and some treble
hooks and manage to foul-hook four small mullets. Estéban and the women tie the
Bonanza’s midget life raft out in the mangroves to catch rain. The wind is
parching hot. No planes go by.

Finally another
shower comes over and yields us six ounces of water apiece. When the sunset
envelops the world in golden smoke, we squat on the sandbar to eat wet raw
mullet and Instant Breakfast crumbs. The women are now in shorts, neat but
definitely not sexy.

“I never
realized how refreshing raw fish is,” Mrs. Parsons says pleasantly. Her
daughter chuckles, also pleasantly. She’s on Mamma’s far side away from Estéban
and me. I have Mrs. Parsons figured now; Mother Hen protecting only chick from
male predators. That’s all right with me. I came here to fish.