The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  But we had to head back some time and face the scales. I weighed our haul three times with Amaryllis’ scale, got a different number each time, but all within ten pounds of each other, and more importantly twenty pounds under quota. Not that it would matter. We rowed into the slip at the scale house, and Anders was the scalemaster on duty again. I almost hauled up our sails and turned us around, never to return. I couldn’t face him, not after the perfect trip. Nina was right – it wasn’t fair that this one man could ruin us with false surpluses and black marks.

  Silently, we secured Amaryllis to the dock and began handing up our cargo. I managed to keep from even looking at Anders, which probably made me look guilty in his eyes. But we’d already established I could be queen of perfection and he would consider me guilty.

  Anders’ frown was smug, his gaze judgmental. I could already hear him tell me I was fifty pounds over quota. Another haul like that, he’d say, we’ll have to see about yanking your fishing rights. I’d have to punch him. I almost told Garrett to hold me back if I looked like I was going to punch him. But he was already keeping himself between the two of us, as if he thought I might really do it.

  If the old scalemaster managed to break up Amaryllis, I’d murder him. And wouldn’t that be a worse crime than any I might represent?

  Anders drew out the moment, looking us all up and down before finally announcing, “Sixty over this time. And you think you’re good at this.”

  My hands tightened into fists. I imagined myself lunging at him. At this point, what could I lose?

  “We’d like an audit,” Nina said, slipping past Sun, Garrett, and me to stand before the stationmaster, frowning, hands on her hips.

  “Excuse me?” Anders said.

  “An audit. I think your scale is wrong, and we’d like an audit. Right?” She looked at me.

  It was probably better than punching him. “Yes,” I said, after a flabbergasted moment. “Yes, we would like an audit.”

  That set off two hours of chaos in the scale house. Anders protested, hollered at us, threatened us. I sent Sun to the committee house to summon official oversight – he wouldn’t try to play nice, and they couldn’t brush him off. June and Abe, two senior committee members, arrived, austere in gray and annoyed.

  “What’s the complaint?” June said.

  Everyone looked at me to answer. I almost denied it – that was my first impulse. Don’t fight, don’t make waves. Because maybe I deserved the trash I got. Or my mother did, but she wasn’t here, was she?

  But Nina was looking at me with her innocent brown eyes, and this was for her.

  I wore a perfectly neutral, business-like expression when I spoke to June and Abe. This wasn’t about me, it was about business, quotas, and being fair.

  “Scalemaster Anders adjusts the scale’s calibration when he sees us coming.”

  I was amazed when they turned accusing gazes at him and not at me. Anders’ mouth worked, trying to stutter a defense, but he had nothing to say.

  The committee confirmed that Anders was rigging his scale. They offered us reparations, out of Anders’ own rations. I considered – it would mean extra credits, extra food and supplies for the household. We’d been discussing getting another windmill, petitioning for another well. Instead, I recommended that any penalties they wanted to levy should go to community funds. I just wanted Amaryllis treated fairly.

  And I wanted a meeting, to make one more petition before the committee.

  Garrett walked with me to the committee office the next morning.

  “I should have been the one to think of requesting an audit,” I said.

  “Nina isn’t as scared of the committee as you are. As you were,” he said.

  “I’m not — ” But I stopped, because he was right.

  He squeezed my hand. His smile was amused, his gaze warm. He seemed to find the whole thing entertaining. Me – I was relieved, exhausted, giddy, ashamed. Mostly relieved.

  We, Amaryllis, had done nothing wrong. I had done nothing wrong.

  Garrett gave me a long kiss, then waited outside while I went to sit before the committee.

  June was in her chair, along with five other committee members, behind their long table with their slate boards, tally sheets, and lists of quotas. I sat across from them, alone, hands clenched in my lap, trying not to tap my feet. Trying to appear as proud and assured as they did. A stray breeze slipped through the open windows and cooled the cinderblock room.

  After polite greetings, June said, “You wanted to make a petition?”

  “We – the Amaryllis crew – would like to request an increase in our quota. Just a small one.”

  June nodded. “We’ve already discussed it and we’re of a mind to allow an increase. Would that be suitable?”

  Suitable as what? As reparation? As an apology? My mouth was dry, my tongue frozen. My eyes stung, wanting to weep, but that would have damaged our chances, as much as just being me did.

  “There’s one more thing,” I managed. “With an increased quota, we can feed another mouth.”

  It was an arrogant thing to say, but I had no reason to be polite.

  They could chastise me, send me away without a word, lecture me on wanting too much when there wasn’t enough to go around. Tell me that it was more important to maintain what we had rather than try to expand – expansion was arrogance. We simply had to maintain. But they didn’t. They didn’t even look shocked at what I had said.

  June, so elegant, I thought, with her long gray hair braided and resting over her shoulder, a knitted shawl draped around her, as much for decoration as for warmth, reached into the bag at her feet and retrieved a folded piece of cloth, which she pushed across the table toward me. I didn’t want to touch it. I was still afraid, as if I’d reach for it and June would snatch it away at the last moment. I didn’t want to unfold it to see the red and green pattern in full, in case it was some other color instead.

  But I did, even though my hand shook. And there it was. I clenched the banner in my fist; no one would be able to pry it out.

  “Is there anything else you’d like to speak of?” June asked.

  “No,” I said, my voice a whisper. I stood, nodded at each of them. Held the banner to my chest, and left the room.

  Garrett and I discussed it on the way back to the house. The rest of the crew was waiting in the courtyard for us: Dakota in her skirt and tunic, hair in a tangled bun; J.J. with his arms crossed, looking worried; Sun, shirtless, hands on hips, inquiring. And Nina, right there in front, bouncing almost.

  I regarded them, trying to be inscrutable, gritting my teeth to keep from bursting into laughter. I held our banner behind my back to hide it. Garrett held my other hand.

  “Well?” Nina finally said. “How did it go? What did they say?”

  The surprise wasn’t going to get any better than this. I shook out the banner and held it up for them to see. And oh, I’d never seen all of them wide-eyed and wondering, mouths gaping like fish, at once.

  Nina broke the spell, laughing and running at me, throwing herself into my arms. We nearly fell over.

  Then we were all hugging, and Dakota started worrying right off, talking about what we needed to build a crib, all the fabric we’d need for diapers, and how we only had nine months to save up the credits for it.

  I recovered enough to hold Nina at arm’s length, so I could look her in the eyes when I pressed the banner into her hands. She nearly dropped it at first, skittering from it as if it were fire. So I closed her fingers around the fabric and held them there.

  “It’s yours,” I said. “I want you to have it.” I glanced at Garrett to be sure. And yes, he was still smiling.

  Staring at me, Nina held it to her chest, much like I had. “But . . . you. It’s yours . . .” She started crying. Then so did I, gathering her close and holding her tight while she spoke through tears, “Don’t you want to be a mother?”

  In fact, I rather thought I already was.

  SEVEN CITI
ES OF GOLD

  David Moles

  David Moles has sold fiction to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Polyphony, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Say . . . , Flytrap, and elsewhere. He coedited, with Jay Lake, 2004’s well-received “retro-pulp” anthology All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, as well as coediting, with Susan Marie Groppi, the original anthology, Twenty Epics.

  In the masterfully done work of alternate history that follows, Moles takes us on a Heart of Darkness journey undertaken by a haunted and conflicted woman, down a river that runs right through the middle of a vividly described war zone, toward an uncertain and perilous destination that might not even exist.

  THE TYPHOON RAIN came in off the Gulf of Mexico and clawed at the burning city like the jaguars that the Maya say will fall from the sky at the end of the world. It hissed down on the hot glazed stone of the Praza dos Bispos, clattered on the tiles of the Alta Cidad, damped the fires, washed the ashes from the idolaters’ ghetto. It streamed down the green canvas of the Andalusian army’s abandoned positions and rattled the yellow plastic shells of the crowded Japanese field hospitals. It dripped down the necks of tired Relief Ministry doctors measuring their doses of opium, and of worried Industrial Ministry technicians hunched over their radiation counters. It filled canals and overflowed gutters, poured through breached levees, rinsed streets in brown water flecked with pale foam. It floated burned bodies out to sea.

  “Dr. Nakada?”

  The Relief Ministry subaltern rattled the hollow door panel. There was no answer from inside. He slid the door open a hand’s-breadth, where it stuck. In the strip of bright Caribbean sunlight he saw scuffed blue plastic matting, ridged in imitation of tatami, and stretched across it the tanned skin of a woman’s arm.

  He lifted the door off its track, flooding the little bungalow with light, eliciting a groan from the bungalow’s occupant. As the subaltern removed his sandals and stepped inside, his gaze went from the woman on the pallet – her feet bare, her short black hair matted, her blue duck Ministry field coat and trousers wrinkled and unbelted – to the low table where an open formulary kit sat next to an empty teacup, a packet of Turkish opiated cigarillos, and a pot that had boiled dry on an electric ring. He squatted to sniff the cup and the woman’s breath; lifted her wrist from the floor and took her pulse; examined her face and her ears and, ignoring her sleepy protests, opened her mouth to shine a small pocket-light on her tongue.

  When the subaltern released her jaw, the woman asked, “Where am I?”

  The tone of her voice suggested she’d already been told once, and hadn’t liked the answer.

  “Camp Xaragua, Doctor,” the subaltern said. “Caribe.”

  He waited for another question, but instead she put an arm across her eyes and started to snore.

  The subaltern sighed, opened the woman’s formulary kit to the compartment marked Remedies (Lower-Class), and went to work.

  A little later, Doctor-Lieutenant Chië Nakada, awake and wearing sandals, her hands and face washed, her uniform straightened, her hair brushed and held out of her eyes by a clean scarf, was strapped into the jump seat of a utility coleopter.

  She had a headache.

  The hot air in the coleopter’s noisy metal belly smelled of disinfectant and old blood. Nakada closed her eyes and breathed it in. It smelled like home.

  I still don’t know why they chose me. But then I wasn’t their first choice.

  My last tour was in Indochina, a South Siamese refugee camp on the edge of the Malay civil war. Half a million refugees came through that camp in the three years I was there, on the way to Madagascar or Xinjiang or wherever the world powers needed more workers.

  Hard lives. Bad memories. There’s nothing romantic about the life of a refugee. But at least their war was over.

  For me, after that tour, something broke. I went back to Japan, and I wandered around like a sleepwalker. I made love to my husband, I walked my son to school, and at night I dreamed of children starved, women raped and mutilated, men burned by napalm and maimed by machetes and cluster shells and wandering mines. I stood in Kokura Main Station, watching the salarymen and the office ladies stream through, lucky and oblivious, and wondered what I was doing there. I imagined earthquakes, incendiary bombs. Imagined the station in ruins, the commuters trapped under burning beams, screaming for help. My help.

  And after a while, I started wishing it would happen.

  – from the pillow book of Doctor-Lieutenant Chië Nakada

  Nakada followed the subaltern along the glassed-in promenade deck of the hospital ship Mappô Maru. The typhoon had moved off north, over the low green coast, but the sky was still alive with scudding gray clouds, and beyond the sweep of Mappô Maru’s broad wing the water on which the relief fleet rode at anchor was like cracked green shale. A line of cargo ships stretched out of sight to east and west, freighters stacked with food and water and portable shelters and dry cement. Nakada counted three more big yellow ground-effect craft like Mappô Maru riding at anchor. There were smaller boats in the water, and hovercraft, and more coleopters in the air.

  The Japanese humanitarian-industrial complex, swinging belatedly into action. The response disproportionate for one typhoon. Nakada supposed somebody had been caught flatfooted and was trying now to make up for lost time with a show of vigorous activity.

  Beneath Mappô Maru’s drooping whale-fluke tail, the Doctor-General’s compartment stretched the full width of the deck. It was austerely furnished, in a way meant to suggest a formal receiving room somewhere in the Home Islands – real tatami mats, painted paper screens, lacquered cabinets, blossoming branches set with artful asymmetry in narrow vases, a formal portrait of the Regent at Mt. Yoshino. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the harsh fluorescents and the hull’s naked aluminum curve. Despite the air that blew from the ceiling vents, the compartment was close, a little too warm and a little too humid. It smelled of stale tobacco.

  The subaltern bowed and left, shutting the door. The aft half of the compartment, where Nakada supposed the gallery windows would be, was screened off. In this half, a low black table was set with teacups and an ashtray, and at it a man and a woman knelt on red cushions.

  The woman Nakada knew, at least by appearance: Nobuko Araki, Doctor-General. Japanese, long-faced, long hair streaked with gray, wearing a coat of indigo-dyed linen over a uniform cut from a visibly better grade of cloth than Nakada’s. Araki, the I.C., Incident Commander for the entire Antilian Mission. The man was a foreigner, in Iskandariya silk, with an orangish beard shot with gray, and the pale freckled skin of Varangia or northern al-Andalus. A crimson turban made his skin look even more pale than it was. His eyes, fixed on Nakada as he tapped the ash from his cigarillo, seemed to have no color at all.

  “Thank you for coming, Dr. Nakada.” The voice came from her right. The speaker, who Nakada hadn’t even noticed until he spoke, was a tall, bespectacled Pharmacologist-Major, about Nakada’s own age or a little younger. The embroidered tag on his uniform read KAWABATA.

  Araki said, “Sit down, Nakada. Have some tea.”

  There was another cushion on Araki’s left. Nakada slipped off her sandals and knelt as an orderly poured cold dark tea into a porcelain cup.

  “Cold barley tea’s all I can drink in this heat, Doctor,” Araki said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  Nakada cleared her throat. “No, ma’am; I prefer it myself.”

  Kawabata, still standing, opened a cabinet and took out an aluminum scroll case. He snapped it open and unrolled the file inside.

  “Dr. Nakada, in Daiwa 18 you led the first medical response team into Pachacamac after the earthquake, is that correct?”

  “Correct, sir.” Nakada took a sip of tea. It tasted like burnt rice.

  “And in the first year of Seisho” – Kawabata said, looking at the file – “you saved the Sultan of Majapahit from a poison administered by his own physician.”

  “He�
��d eaten some bad shellfish, sir.”

  “Ever worked with Christians?”

  “In Axum,” Nakada said. “During the famine. And of course when I studied in Kostantiniyye.”

  “But not Antilian or Frankish Christians,” the foreigner said. His Japanese was good, with only a trace of accent.

  “No, sir.”

  Araki and the foreigner exchanged glances.

  “You’ve been in Xaragua how long?” Araki asked.

  “Three weeks, ma’am.”

  “Then you must be eager to get back in the field.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Absolutely.”

  The Pharmacologist-Major took out another file.

  “Six days ago, Doctor,” Kawabata said, “Antilian insurgents smuggled an experimental bomb into the occupied city of Espírito Santo, on the lower Acuamagna. Smuggled it through the Exclusion Zone established by the Relief Ministry to — ” He stopped and cleared is throat. “To separate the Antilian bishops’ territory from the areas occupied by al-Andalus. We still don’t know exactly what kind of bomb it was – or how it worked – or whether they have any more. The Industrial Ministry suggests it may have something to do with sub-atomic forces, but we really don’t know.”

  The clack of Doctor-General Araki’s teacup as she set it down had the interrupting authority of a meditation leader’s wooden blocks. “What we do know is that it burned half the city and killed thirty thousand people. Including twenty thousand Antilian Christians. If I didn’t know Abbot-Doctor Shingen personally, I wouldn’t believe the reports he’s sending us. Thousands of burn victims. Thousands more who were outside the fire area but still have burn-like symptoms. Other symptoms similar to typhoid fever – nausea, hair loss, skin lesions. And since it’s the rainy season here, we can expect actual typhoid fever any time, not to mention cholera, yellow fever, and malaria. For all I know, we should expect leprosy and the bubonic plague. We’re looking at the biggest humanitarian crisis in ten years.”