The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  I shrugged. “You never know.” The waitress brought us our first plates, grilled fungi on a stick for me. Braz had a bowl of small animals with tails, deep-fried. Finger food; you hold them by the tail and dip them into a pungent yellow sauce.

  It was much better than I’d expected; the fungi were threaded onto a stick of some aromatic wood like laurel; she brought a small glass of a lavender-colored drink, tasting like dry sherry, to go with them.

  “So it’s not about getting bored?” he asked. “That’s how you normally see it. In books, on the cube . . .”

  “Maybe the reality isn’t dramatic enough. Or too complicated to tell as a simple drama.

  “You live a few hundred years, at least on Earth, you slowly leave your native culture behind. You’re an immortal – culturally true if not literally – and your non-immortal friends and family and business associates die off. The longer you live, the deeper you go into the immortal community.”

  “There must be some nonconformists.”

  “ ‘Mavericks,’ the cowboys used to say.”

  “Before the pirates did them in.”

  “Right. There aren’t many mavericks past their first century of life extension. The people you grew up with are either fellow immortals or dead. Together, the survivors form a society that’s unusually cohesive. So when someone decides to leave, decides to stop living, the arrangements are complex and may involve hundreds of people.

  “That’s where I come in, the practical part of my job: I’m a kind of overall estate manager. They all have significant wealth; few have any living relatives closer than great-great-grandchildren.”

  “You help them split up their fortunes?”

  “It’s more interesting than that. The custom for centuries has been to put together a legacy, so called, that is a complex and personal aesthetic expression. To simply die, and let the lawyers sort it out, would trivialize your life as well as your death. It’s my job to make sure that the legacy is a meaningful and permanent extension of the person’s life.

  “Sometimes a physical monument is involved; more often a financial one, through endowments and sponsorships. Which is what brings me here.”

  Our main courses came; Braz had a kind of eel, bright green with black antennae, apparently raw, but my braised vegetables were reassuringly familiar.

  “So one of your clients is financing something here on Seca?”

  “Financing me, actually. It’s partly a gift; we get along well. But it’s part of a pattern of similar bequests to non-immortals, to give us back lost memories.”

  “How lost?”

  “It was a military program, to counteract the stress of combat. They called the drug aqualethe. Have you heard of it?”

  He shook his head. “Water of what?”

  “It’s a linguistic mangling, or mingling. Latin and Greek. Lethe was a river in Hell; a spirit drank from it to forget his old life, so he could be reincarnated.

  “A pretty accurate name. It basically disconnects your long-term memory as a way of diverting combat stress, so-called post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “It worked?”

  “Too well. I spent eight months here as a soldier, when I was in my early twenties. I don’t remember anything specific between the voyage here and the voyage back.”

  “It was a horrible war. Short but harsh. Maybe you don’t want the memory back. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ we say here.”

  “We say that, too. But for me . . . well, you could say it’s a professional handicap. Though actually it goes deeper.

  “Part of what I do with my clients is a mix of meditation and dialogue. I try to help them form a coherent tapestry of their lives, the good and the bad, as a basic grounding for their legacy. The fact that I could never do that for myself hinders me as a counselor. Especially when the client, like this one, had his own combat experiences to deal with.”

  “He’s, um, dead now?”

  “Oh, no. Like many of them, he’s in no particular hurry. He just wants to be ready.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Three hundred and ninety Earth years. Aiming for four centuries, he thinks.”

  Braz sawed away at his eel and looked thoughtful. “I can’t imagine. I mean, I sort of understand when a normal man gets so old he gives up. Their hold on life becomes weak, and they let go. But your man is presumably fit and sane.”

  “More than I, I think.”

  “So why four hundred years rather than five? Or three? Why not try for a thousand? That’s what I would do, if I were that rich.”

  “So would I. At least that’s how I feel now. My patron says he felt that way when he was mortal. But he can’t really articulate what happened to slowly change his attitude.

  “He says it would be like trying to explain married love to a babe just learning to talk. The babe thinks it knows what love is, and can apply the word to its own circumstances. But it doesn’t have the vocabulary or life experience to approach the larger meaning.”

  “An odd comparison, marriage,” he said, delicately separating the black antennae from the head. “You can become unmarried. But not undead.”

  “The babe wouldn’t know about divorce. Maybe there is a level of analogy there.”

  “We don’t know what death is?”

  “Perhaps not as well as they.”

  I liked Braz and needed to hire a guide; he had some leave coming and could use the side income. His Spanish was good, and that was rare on Secas; they spoke a kind of patchwork of Portuguese and English. If I’d studied it thirty years before, I’d retained none.

  The therapy to counteract aqualethe was a mixture of brain chemistry and environment. Simply put, the long-term memories were not destroyed by aqualethe, but the connection to them had been weakened. There was a regimen of twenty pills I had to take twice daily, and I had to take them in surroundings that would jog my memory.

  That meant going back to some ugly territory.

  There were no direct flights to Serraro, the mountainous desert where my platoon had been sent to deal with a situation now buried in secrecy, perhaps shame. We could get within a hundred kilometers of it, an oasis town called Console Verde. I made arrangements to rent a general-purpose vehicle there, a jépe.

  After Braz and I made those arrangements, I got a note from some Chief of Internal Security saying that my activities were of questionable legality, and I should report to his office at 0900 tomorrow to defend my actions. We were in the airport, fortunately, when I got the message, and we jumped on a flight that was leaving in twenty minutes, paying cash. Impossible on Earth.

  I told Braz I would buy us a couple of changes of clothing and such at the Oasis, and we got on the jet with nothing but our papers, my medications, and the clothes on our backs – and my purse, providentially stuffed with the paper notes they use instead of plastic. (I’d learned that the exchange rate was much better on Earth, and was carrying half a year’s salary in those notes.)

  The flight wasn’t even suborbital, and took four hours to go about a tenth of the planet’s circumference. We slept most of the way; it didn’t take me twenty minutes to tell him everything I had been able to find out about that two-thirds year that was taken from me.

  Serraro is not exactly a bastion of freedom of information under the best of circumstances, and that was a period in their history that many would just as soon forget.

  It was not a poor country. The desert was rich in the rare earths that interstellar jumps required. There had been lots of small mines around the countryside (no farms) and only one city of any size. That was Novo B, short for Novo Brasil, and it was still not the safest spot in the Confederación. Not on our itinerary.

  My platoon had begun its work in Console Verde as part of a force of one thousand. When we returned to that oasis, there were barely six hundred of us left. But the country had been “unified.” Where there had been 78 mines there now was one, Preciosa, and no one wanted to talk about how that happened.


  The official history says that the consolidation of those 78 mines was a model of self-determinism, the independent miners banding together for strength and bargaining power. There was some resistance, even some outlaw guerilla action. But the authorities – I among them, evidently – got things under control in less than a year.

  Travel and residence records had all been destroyed by a powerful explosion blamed on the guerillas, but in the next census, Serarro had lost thirty-five percent of its population. Perhaps they walked away.

  We stood out as foreigners in our business suits; most men who were not in uniform wore a plain loose white robe. I went immediately into a shop next to the airport and bought two of them, and two sidearms. Braz hadn’t fired a pistol in years, but he had to agree he would look conspicuous here without one.

  We stood out anyway, pale and tall. The men here were all sunburned and most wore long braided black hair. Our presence couldn’t be kept secret; I wondered how long it would be before that Chief of Internal Security caught up with me. I was hoping it was just routine harassment, and they wouldn’t follow us here.

  There was only one room at the small inn, but Braz didn’t mind sharing. In fact, he suggested we pass the time with sex, which caught me off guard. I told him men don’t routinely do that on Earth, at least not the place and time I came from. He accepted that with a nod.

  I asked the innkeeper whether the town had a library, and he said no, but I could try the schoolhouse on the other side of town. Braz was napping, so I left a note and took off on my own, confident in my ability to turn right and go to the end of the road.

  Although I’d been many places on Earth, the only time I’d been in space was that eight-month tour here. So I kept my eyes open for “alien” details.

  Seca had a Drake index of 0.95, which by rule of thumb meant that only five percent of it was more harsh than the worst the Earth had to offer. The equatorial desert, I supposed. We were in what would have been a temperate latitude on Earth, and I was sweating freely in the dry heat.

  The people here were only five generations away from Earth, but some genetic drift was apparent. No more profound than you would find on some islands and other isolated communities on Earth. But I didn’t see a single blonde or red-head in the short, solidly built population here.

  The men wore scowls as well as guns. The women, brighter colors and a neutral distant expression.

  Some of the men, mostly younger, wore a dagger as well as a sidearm. I wondered whether there was some kind of code duello that I would have to watch out for. Probably not wearing a dagger would protect you from that.

  Aside from a pawn shop, with three balls, and a tavern with bright signs announcing berbesa and bino, most of the shops were not identified. I supposed that in a small isolated town, everybody knew where everything was.

  Two men stopped together, blocking the sidewalk. One of them touched his pistol and said something incomprehensible, loudly.

  “From Earth,” I said, in unexcited Confederación Spanish. Soy de la Tierra.” They looked at each other and went by me. I tried to ignore the crawling feeling in the middle of my back.

  I reflected on my lack of soldierly instincts. Should I have touched my gun as well? Probably not. If they’d started shooting, what should I do? Hurl my 60-year-old body to the ground, roll over with the pistol in my hand, and aim for the chest?

  “Two in the chest, then one in the head,” I remembered from crime drama. But I didn’t remember anything that basic from having been a soldier. My training on Earth had mainly been calisthenics and harassment. Endless hours of parade-ground drill. Weapons training would come later, they said. The only thing “later” meant to me was months later, slowly regaining my identity on the trip back to Earth.

  By the time I’d gotten off the ship, I seemed to have all my memories back through basic training, and the lift ride up to the troop carrier. We had 1.5-gee acceleration to the Oort portal, but somewhere along there I lost my memory, and didn’t get it back till the return trip. Then they dropped me on Earth – me and the other survivors – with a big check and a leather case full of medals. Plus a smaller check, every month, for my lost finger.

  I knew I was approaching the school by the small tide of children running in my direction, about fifty of them, ranging from seven or eight to about twelve, in Earth years.

  The schoolhouse was small, three or four rooms. A grey-bearded man, unarmed, stepped out and I hailed him. We established that we had English in common and I asked whether the school had a library. He said yes, and it would be open for two hours yet. “Mostly children’s books, of course. What are you interested in?”

  “History,” I said. “Recent. The Consolidation War.”

  “Ah. Follow me.” He led me through a dusty playground, to the rear of the school. “You were a Confederación soldier?”

  “I guess that’s obvious.”

  He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “You know to be careful?” I said I did. “Don’t go out at night alone. Your size is like a beacon.” He opened the door and said, “Suela? A traveler is looking for a history book.”

  The room was high-ceilinged and cool, with thick stone walls and plenty of light from the uniform glow of the ceiling. An elderly woman with white hair taking paper books from a cart and re-shelving them.

  “Pardon my poor English,” she said, with an accent better than mine. “But what do you want in a paper book that you can’t as easily download?”

  “I was curious to see what children are taught about the Consolidation War.”

  “The same truth as everyone,” she said with a wry expression, and stepped over to another shelf. “Here . . .” she read titles, “this is the only one in English. I can’t let you take it away, but you’re welcome to read it here.”

  I thanked her and took the book to an adult-sized table and chair at the other end of the room. Most of the study area was scaled down. A girl of seven or eight stared at me.

  I didn’t know, really, what I expected to find in the book. It had four pages on the Consolidation and Preciosa, and in broad outline there was not much surprising. A coalition of mines decided that the Confederación wasn’t paying enough for dysprosium, and they got most of the others to go along with the scheme of hiding the stuff and holding out for a fair price – what the book called profiteering and restraint of trade. Preciosa was the biggest mine, and they made a separate deal with the Confederación, guaranteeing a low price, freezing all their competitors out. Which led to war.

  Seca – actually Preciosa – asked for support from the Confederación, and the war became interstellar.

  The book said that most of the war took place far from population centers, in the bleak high desert where the mines were. Here.

  It struck me that I hadn’t noticed many old buildings, older than about thirty years. I remembered a quote from a twentieth-century American war: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

  The elderly librarian sat down across from me. She had a soft voice. “You were here as a soldier. But you don’t remember anything about it.”

  “That’s true. That’s exactly it.”

  “There are those of us who do remember.”

  I pushed the book a couple of inches toward her. “Is any of this true?”

  She turned the book around and scanned the pages it was open to, and shook her head with a grim smile. “Even children know better. What do you think the Confederacíón is?”

  I thought for a moment. “At one level, it’s a loose federation of 48 or 49 planets with a charter protecting the rights of humans and non-humans, and with trade rules that encourage fairness and transparency. At another level, it’s the Hartford Corporation, the wealthiest enterprise in human history. Which can do anything it wants, presumably.”

  “And on a personal level? What is it to you?”

  “It’s an organization that gave me a job when jobs were scarce. Security specialist. Although I wasn’t a ‘speci
alist’ in any sense of the word. A generalist, so called.”

  “A mercenary.”

  “Not so called. Nothing immoral or illegal.”

  “But they took your memory of it away. So it could have been either, or both.”

  “Could have been,” I admitted. “I’m going to find out. Do you know about the therapy that counteracts aqualethe?”

  “No . . . it gives you your memories back?”

  “So they say. I’m going to drive down into Serarro tomorrow, and see what happens. You take the pills in the place you want to remember.”

  “Do me a favor,” she said, sliding the book back, “and yourself, perhaps. Take the pills here, too.”

  “I will. We had a headquarters here. I must have at least passed through.”

  “Look for me in the crowd, welcoming you. You were all so exotic and handsome. I was a girl, just ten.”

  Ten here would be fourteen on Earth. This old lady was younger than me. No juve treatments. “I don’t think the memories will be that detailed. I’ll look for you, though.”

  She patted my hand and smiled. “You do that.”

  Braz was still sleeping when I got back to the inn. Six time zones to adjust to; might as well let him sleep. My body was still on meaningless starship time, but I’ve never had much trouble adjusting. My counseling job is a constant whirl of time zones.

  I quietly slipped into the other bunk and put some Handel in my earbuds to drown out his snoring.

  The inn didn’t have any vegetables for breakfast, so I had a couple of eggs that I hoped had come from a bird, and a large dry flavorless cracker. Our jepé arrived at 8:30 and I went out to pay the substantial deposit and inspect it. Guaranteed bulletproof except for the windows, nice to know.

  I took the first leg of driving, since I’d be taking the memory drug later, and the label had the sensible advice Do Not Operate Machinery While Hallucinating. Words to live by.

  The city, such as it was, didn’t dwindle off into suburbs. It’s an oasis, and where the green stopped, the houses stopped.

  I drove very cautiously at first. My car in LA is restricted to autopilot, and it had been several years since I was last behind a steering wheel. A little exhilarating.