The Very Best of F & SF v1 (35 page)

We know his
name. Patient researchers, using advanced scanning techniques, followed his
letters back through the postal system and found him, but by that time he was
safely dead.

The whole world
has been at peace for more than a generation. Crime is almost unheard of. Free
energy has made the world rich, but the population is stable, even though early
detection has wiped out most diseases. Everyone can do whatever he likes,
providing his neighbors would not disapprove, and after all, their views are
the same as his own.

You are forty, a
respected scholar, taking a few days out to review your life, as many people do
at your age. You have watched your mother and father coupling on the night they
conceived you, watched yourself growing in her womb, first a red tadpole, then
a thing like an embryo chicken, then a big-headed baby kicking and squirming.
You have seen yourself delivered, seen the first moment when your bloody head
broke into the light. You have seen yourself staggering about the nursery in
rompers, clutching a yellow plastic duck. Now you are watching yourself hiding
behind the fallen tree on the bill, and you realize that there are no secret
places. And beyond you in the ghostly future you know that someone is watching
you as you watch; and beyond that watcher another, and beyond that another.... Forever.

Return to Table of
Contents

Stephen King was already a bestselling
novelist before he published a word in F&SF, but sometimes it still seems
like the seven stories he published in our magazine in the late 1970s and early
’80s were seminal in his career. Perhaps that’s simply because he started his
famous series of Gunslinger tales with this one, which first ran in 1978. Whatever
the reason, we’ve certainly enjoyed a good relationship with the man who ranks
as one of the greatest storytellers of our time. Here’s hoping you too will
enjoy this great
story.

I

The man in black fled across the desert,
and the gunslinger followed.

The desert was
the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what might have
been parsecs in all directions. White; blinding; waterless; without feature
save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on
the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death.
An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that
cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway and coaches
had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.

The gunslinger
walked stolidly, not hurrying, not loafing. A hide waterbag was slung around
his middle like a bloated sausage. It was almost full. He had progressed
through the
khef
over many years, and had reached the fifth level. At the seventh or
eighth, he would not have been thirsty; he could have watched his own body
dehydrate with clinical, detached attention, watering its crevices and dark
inner hollows only when his logic told him it must be done. He was not seventh
or eighth. He was fifth. So he was thirsty, although he had no particular urge
to drink. In a vague way, all this pleased him. It was romantic.

Below the
waterbag were his guns, finely weighted to his hand. The two belts crisscrossed
above his crotch. The holsters were oiled too deeply for even this Philistine
sun to crack. The stocks of the guns were sandalwood, yellow and finely
grained. The holsters were tied down with rawhide cord, and they swung heavily
against his hips. The brass casings of the cartridges looped into the gunbelts
twinkled and flashed and heliographed in the sun. The leather made subtle
creaking noises. The guns themselves made no noise. They had spilled blood.
There was no need to make noise in the sterility of the desert.

His clothes were
the no-color of rain or dust. His shirt was open at the throat, with a rawhide
thong dangling loosely in hand-punched eyelets. The pants were seam-stretched
dungarees of no particular make.

He breasted a
gently rising dune (although there was no sand here; the desert was hardpan,
and even the harsh winds that blew when dark came raised only an aggravating
harsh dust like scouring powder) and saw the kicked remains of a tiny campfire
on the lee side, the side which the sun would quit earliest. Small signs like
this, once more affirming the man in black’s essential humanity, never failed
to please him. His lips stretched in the pitted, flaked remains of his face. He
squatted.

He had burned
the devil-grass, of course. It was the only thing out here that
would
burn. It burned with
a greasy, flat light, and it burned slow. Border dwellers had told him that
devils lived even in the flames. They burned it but would not look into the
light. They said the devils hypnotized, beckoned, would eventually draw the one
who looked into the fires. And the next man foolish enough to look into the
fire might see you.

The burned grass
was crisscrossed in the now-familiar ideographic pattern, and crumbled to gray
senselessness before the gunslinger’s prodding hand. There was nothing in the
remains but a charred scrap of bacon, which he ate thoughtfully. It had always
been this way. The gunslinger had followed the man in black across the desert
for two months now, across the endless, screamingly monotonous purgatorial
wastes, and had yet to find spoor other than the hygienic sterile ideographs of
the man in black’s campfires. He had not found a can, a bottle, a waterskin
(the gunslinger had left four of those behind, like dead snakeskins).

— Perhaps the
campfires are a message, spelled out letter by letter.
Take a powder.
Or,
The end draweth nigh.
Or
maybe even,
Eat at Joe’s.
It didn’t matter. He had no understanding of the ideograms, if they
were ideograms. And the remains were as cold as all the others. He knew he was
closer, but did not know how he knew. That didn’t matter either. He stood up,
brushing his hands.

No other trace;
the wind, razor-sharp, had of course filed away even what scant tracks the
hardpan held. He had never even been able to find his quarry’s droppings.
Nothing. Only these cold campfires along the ancient highway and the relentless
range-finder in his own head.

He sat down and
allowed himself a short pull from the waterbag. He scanned the desert, looked
up at the sun, which was now sliding down the far quadrant of the sky. He got
up, removed his gloves from his belt, and began to pull devil-grass for his own
fire, which he laid over the ashes the man in black had left. He found the
irony, like the romance of his thirst, bitterly appealing.

He did not use
the flint and steel until the remains of the day were only the fugitive heat in
the ground beneath him and a sardonic orange line on the monochrome western
horizon. He watched the south patiently, toward the mountains, not hoping or
expecting to see the thin straight line of smoke from a new campfire, but
merely watching because that was a part of it. There was nothing. He was close,
but only relatively so. Not close enough to see smoke at dusk.

He struck his
spark to the dry, shredded grass and lay down upwind, letting the dreamsmoke
blow out toward the waste. The wind, except for occasional gyrating
dust-devils, was constant.

Above, the stars
were unwinking, also constant. Suns and worlds by the million. Dizzying
constellations, cold fire in every primary hue. As he watched, the sky washed
from violet to ebony. A meteor etched a brief, spectacular arc and winked out.
The fire threw strange shadows as the devil-grass burned its slow way down into
new patterns—not ideograms but a straightforward crisscross vaguely frightening
in its own no-nonsense surety. He had laid his fuel in a pattern that was not
artful but only workable. It spoke of blacks and whites. It spoke of a man who
might straighten bad pictures in strange hotel rooms. The fire burned its
steady, slow flame, and phantoms danced in its incandescent core. The
gunslinger did not see. He slept. The two patterns, art and craft, were welded
together. The wind moaned. Every now and then a perverse downdraft would make
the smoke whirl and eddy toward him, and sporadic whiffs of the smoke touched
him. They built dreams in the same way that a small irritant may build a pearl
in an oyster. Occasionally the gunslinger moaned with the wind. The stars were
as indifferent to this as they were to
wars, crucifixions,
resurrections. This also would have pleased him.

II

He had come down
off the last of the foothills leading the donkey, whose eyes were already dead
and bulging with the heat. He had passed the last town three weeks before, and
since then there had only been the deserted coach track and an occasional
huddle of border dwellers’ sod dwellings. The huddles had degenerated into
single dwellings, most inhabited by lepers or madmen. He found the madmen
better company. One had given him a stainless steel Silva compass and bade him
give it to Jesus. The gunslinger took it gravely. If he saw Him, he would turn
over the compass. He did not expect to.

Five days had
passed since the last hut, and he had begun to suspect there would be no more
when he topped the last eroded hill and saw the familiar low-backed sod roof.

The dweller, a
surprisingly young man with a wild shock of strawberry hair that reached almost
to his waist, was weeding a scrawny stand of corn with zealous abandon. The
mule let out a wheezing grunt and the dweller looked up, glaring blue eyes
coming target-center on the gunslinger in a moment. He raised both hands in
curt salute and then bent to the corn again, humping up the row next to his hut
with back bent, tossing devil-grass and an occasional stunted corn plant over
his shoulder. His hair flopped and flew in the wind that now came directly from
the desert, with nothing to break it.

The gunslinger
came down the hill slowly, leading the donkey on which his waterskins sloshed.
He paused by the edge of the lifeless-looking cornpatch, drew a drink from one
of his skins to start the saliva, and spat into the arid soil.

“Life for your
crop.”

“Life for your
own,” the dweller answered and stood up. His back popped audibly. He surveyed
the gunslinger without fear. What little of his face that was visible between
beard and hair seemed unmarked by the rot, and his eyes, while a bit wild,
seemed sane.

“I don’t have
anything but corn and beans,” he said. “Corn’s free, but you’ll have to kick
something in for the beans. A man brings them out once in a while. He don’t
stay long.” The dweller laughed shortly. “Afraid of spirits.”

“I expect he
thinks you’re one.”

“I expect he
does.”

They looked at
each other in silence for a moment.

The dweller put
out his hand. “Brown is my name.”

The gunslinger
shook his hand. As he did so, a scrawny raven croaked from the low peak of the
sod roof. The dweller gestured at it briefly:

“That’s Zoltan.”

At the sound of
its name the raven croaked again and flew across to Brown. It landed on the
dweller’s head and roosted, talons firmly twined in the wild thatch of hair.

“Screw you,” Zoltan
croaked brightly. “Screw you and the horse you rode in on.”

The gunslinger
nodded amiably.

“Beans, beans,
the musical fruit,” the raven recited, inspired. “The more you eat, the more
you toot.”

“You teach him
that?”

“That’s all he
wants to learn, I guess,” Brown said. “Tried to teach him The Lord’s Prayer
once.” His eyes traveled out beyond the hut for a moment, toward the gritty,
featureless hardpan. “Guess this ain’t Lord’s Prayer country. You’re a
gunslinger. That right?”

“Yes.” He
hunkered down and brought out his makings. Zoltan launched himself from Brown’s
head and landed, flittering, on the gunslinger’s shoulder.

“After the other
one, I guess.”

“Yes.” The
inevitable question formed in his mouth: “How long since he passed by?”

Brown shrugged. “I
don’t know. Time’s funny out here. More than two weeks. Less than two months.
The bean man’s been twice since he passed. I’d guess six weeks. That’s probably
wrong.”

“The more you
eat, the more you toot,” Zoltan said.

“Did he stop
off?” the gunslinger asked.

Brown nodded. “He
stayed supper, same as you will, I guess. We passed the time.”

The gunslinger
stood up and the bird flew back to the roof, squawking. He felt an odd,
trembling eagerness. “What did he talk about?”

Brown cocked an
eyebrow at him. “Not much. Did it ever rain and when did I come here and had I
buried my wife. I did most of the talking, which ain’t usual.” He paused, and
the only sound was the stark wind. “He’s a sorcerer, ain’t he?”

“Yes.”

Brown nodded
slowly. “I knew. Are you?”

“I’m just a man.”

“You’ll never
catch him.”

“I’ll catch him.”

They looked at
each other, a sudden depth of feeling between them, the dweller upon his
dust-puff-dry ground, the gunslinger on the hardpan that shelved down to the
desert. He reached for his flint.

“Here.” Brown
produced a sulfur-headed match and struck it with a grimed nail. The gunslinger
pushed the tip of his smoke into the flame and drew.

“Thanks.”

“You’ll want to
fill your skins,” the dweller said, turning away. “Spring’s under the eaves in
back. I’ll start dinner.”

The gunslinger
stepped gingerly over the rows of corn and went around back. The spring was at
the bottom of a hand-dug well, lined with stones to keep the powdery earth from
caving. As he descended the rickety ladder, the gunslinger reflected that the
stones must represent two years’ work easily— hauling, dragging, laying. The
water was clear but slow-moving, and filling the skins was a long chore. While
he was topping the second, Zoltan perched on the lip of the well.

“Screw you and
the horse you rode in on,” he advised.

He looked up,
startled. The shaft was about fifteen feet deep: easy enough for Brown to drop
a rock on him, break his head, and steal everything on him. A crazy or a rotter
wouldn’t do it; Brown was neither. Yet he liked Brown, and so he pushed the
thought out of his mind and got the rest of his water. What came, came.