The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Steven Popkes made his first sale in 1985, and in the years that followed has contributed a number of distinguished stories to markets such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Sci Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy amp; Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, Science Fiction Age, Full Spectrum, Tomorrow, The Twilight Zone Magazine, Night Cry, and others. His first novel, Caliban Landing, appeared in 1987, and was followed in 1991 by an expansion to novel-length of his popular novella “The Egg,” retitled Slow Lightning. (“The Egg,” in its original form, was in our Seventh Annual Collection.) He was also part of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop project to produce science fiction scenarios about the future of Boston, Massachusetts, that cumulated in the 1 994 anthology, Future Boston, to which he contributed several stories. He lives in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, with his family, works for a company that builds aviation instrumentation, and is learning to be a pilot.

In the compelling story that follows, he shows us that although it might be an admirable goal to get close to nature, maybe you shouldn’t get too close…

Once I got through to Sam Orcutt, Jack Brubaker wasn’t hard to find.

“There he is,” yelled Sam over the roar of the engine and started flying the ancient Cessna in a circle. I suppose the idea of a floatplane is that there is always some lake or river one can land in but I didn’t see any water larger than a pigeon. We were flying deep in the heart of Montana: the Beck-Lewis Wildlife Refuge.

Sam had to be circling for a reason so I looked down the left wing toward the center and sure enough there was a man dressed entirely in fur. He watched us circle for a minute or so, then waved.

Sam leveled out immediately. “He sees us!” he shouted, obviously relieved.

I nodded and checked over Goldie, the red-tailed hawk perched on my shoulder. I’m a freelance human-interest reporter (“HIR” in the trade) and I don’t make that much money. Do I hire a crew? Too expensive. Do I get a partner? In my old Kindergarten class one of the report cards stated: “Does not work well with others.” That particular genetic trait had stayed with me all my life. Instead, I blew a year’s earnings on Goldie. Her visual centers had been modified to download cam quality material to the storage unit and monitor I kept on my belt and she’d been trained to hunt for good camera angles and to watch for my cues.

I lifted her wing to check the readings and the test monitor. If things went well I’d be out here for two weeks and I didn’t want anything to go wrong. The broadcast circuitry passed final self-tests and everything was fully charged. I gave her a strip of steak from a sealed bag in my pocket. She ate it between taking shots of Sam, the airplane, the landscape and me.

We flew up over a ridge and on the other side was a convenient pond no smaller than a postage stamp where we landed. Sam brought the plane up to the shore and we tied it off and unloaded. He brought out two folding chairs and sat them down, then brought out two beers and a six-pack of carbonated water. “Sit down,” he said. “The chairs are for us. He won’t use them.”

About an hour of uncomfortable silence later, Jack Brubaker came over the ridge in a lope. I pulled out my binoculars to see what I could see.

I thought I had seen a man dressed in fur but I was wrong. Jack was covered in fur, all right. His own: a thin pelt the color and texture of a German shepherd. Only the hair on his head and between his legs was different: thick, wiry curls. I couldn’t see any external genitalia. The only naked skin I could see was on the palms of his hands and the area around his eyes and nose. The exposed skin was heavily pigmented but the eyes that shone out under the thick brows were bright, cornflower blue.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah,” agreed Sam, nodding.

It was perhaps a mile from the top of the ridge down to the plane but Jack wasn’t even breathing hard when he reached us.

“Sam!” he said and grinned. He sniffed the air and glanced at me for a moment and nodded in my direction. “It’s good to see you,” he said to Sam. Then, he saw the bottles of seltzer and the grin grew even broader. “You remembered! Thanks.” He opened one immediately, drained it, belched loudly.

Jack was not especially tall-less than six feet, anyway. But he was as broad as a Samoan. His chest and shoulders were deep and even his head looked large. His legs were thick as logs but even so his knees and ankles seemed outsized. He didn’t smell like a man, even a man who had been in the bush for years without ever taking a shower. Instead, he gave off a musk, a flat, strong and unidentifiable scent. It made me think of tigers or hyenas or, of course, wolves. This man had been thoroughly modified.

“Nice bird,” he said, nodding towards Goldie.

“I said the same thing when I saw it,” said Sam. “This is Dan Perry. He wants to do a story on you.”

“A reporter.” He looked back at Sam and then at me.