The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  “Relief efforts have been hampered by the Gulf typhoon season,” Kawabata said. “But the Eleventh Airmobile Group was already in Xaragua when this happened, preparing for deployment to the typhoon track. They’re being diverted to Espírito Santo now.”

  There was a silence. Nakada looked from Kawabata to Araki and back.

  “Yes, sir,” she said eventually.

  “Tell me, Doctor,” the foreigner said, “what is your opinion of war?”

  Nakada looked at him, then at Araki, who gave her a small nod. She turned back to the foreigner.

  “I’m opposed to it, sir.”

  “A natural position for someone in your profession, Doctor. An admirable position. As a diplomat, I too am opposed to war. In particular, I am opposed to wars of religion.”

  There was an expectant pause; then Nakada said, “Yes, sir.”

  Kawabata took out another file case. “Andalusian intelligence believes that the Antilian insurgents are no longer controlled by the Seven Bishops, but by a woman, a former nun, named Clara Dos Orsos.” He took out a piece of paper that had been rolled up inside the file and handed it to Nakada.

  It was a thermal facsimile of a photograph, washed-out and contrasty, and it looked as though the original picture had been none too sharp to begin with. But it was a striking face even so. A woman, in her late twenties or early thirties, with dark, wide-set eyes, cheekbones that suggested more aboriginal Antilian or Mexican ancestry than the Iberian Gothic blood of the Antilian upper classes.

  “She’s a messianic preacher,” Kawabata said. “A charismatic visionary. Her followers call her the Virgin of Apalaxia.”

  “An apocalyptic madwoman is what she is,” Araki said. “Hallucinations, delusions, paranoid ideation, magical thinking – classic schizophrenia, if not psychosis. Doesn’t take orders from anybody but the angels in her head.”

  Nakada watched the foreigner stub out his cigarillo and take out another as he talked, lighting it with an ivory-handled igniter.

  “For some years now, Doctor,” he said, “the Seven Bishops of Antilia have been at war with my people. In the name of religion they have provided madmen, Roman and Frankish Christian madmen, with the tools to do mad things. These men have committed outrages, killing not only Muslims but Jews and Sabeans and, yes, many Christians.”

  He took a long draw from the cigarillo and let the smoke out slowly.

  “Now there is this woman,” he continued, “Dos Orsos. And this terror weapon, this bomb, this city-destroyer – the like of which is not to be found in the Caliphate, nor Persia, nor India, nor China, nor Japan. To drive the Caliph’s armies from their land, in the name of religion, these people build this Satanic machine and this madwoman turns it upon her own people.”

  “Thirty thousand dead, Doctor,” said Araki. “The madness has got to stop.”

  Kawabata cleared his throat. “You’ll be provided with several doses of an experimental antipsychotic remedy,” he said. “A hepato-cardiac reprimant derived from TJ-54. A hybrid ambulance boat will take you up to Espírito Santo. You’ll cross over to the Acuamagna there and proceed upriver, out of the Exclusion Zone; make contact with the surviving bishops somewhere north of La Vitoria, and get their approval to . . . treat Dos Orsos’ condition.”

  Nakada looked from Kawabata to Araki, who nodded.

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  “Treat it,” said the foreigner, “by whatever means necessary.”

  When Nakada awoke, the sun was setting, somewhere behind her. She’d had one of the crew mix her a sleeping draught almost as soon as she was aboard the ambulance boat.

  The hybrid ambulance was part jetboat, part hovercraft, ten meters long and five wide. Most of it was one big piece of yellow injection-molded plastic, spotted with patches of grubby non-skid tape. It looked like a child’s toy.

  One of the crew – it was the nurse who’d mixed her the sleeping draught – was leaning over the side, holding a net on the end of a two-meter bamboo pole. She was round-faced, tanned and freckled, and looked about fifteen years old. She saw Nakada looking at her, and grinned.

  “Where are you from?” Nakada asked.

  “New Yezo,” the girl said, and returned to her net. A name came to Nakada: Hayashi. There must have been introductions at some point.

  New Yezo. A colonial, from the coastal islands, three or four thousand kilometers northwest of Espírito Santo. A land of bears and salmon and logging camps and fish-processing plants. Nakada supposed a six-year hitch with the Ministry must sound pretty good, when the alternative was a berth on a North Pacific factory whaler.

  Nakada sat up. She looked past Hayashi to the long, low shoreline, a kilometer or so away. It looked as alien as the coast of Kalimantan, but it was still the continent Hayashi had been born on. She wondered if that was how the girl thought of it.

  “You served in Antilia before, Doctor?”

  The chief of the boat was at the tiller, a Surgeon-Sergeant named Shiraoka. You couldn’t get much higher than Sergeant without a full medical diploma, and Shiraoka didn’t look like the type to go back and get one. He was in his early forties, with sun-wrinkles around his eyes and a thick black mustache that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Kazakh horse-thief.

  “No,” Nakada told him. “Peru, once. Mainly East Ifriqiya and the Indies. You?”

  “Been here three years.” He shook his head. “Ifriqiya, yeah, been there too. West, mostly. That was some bad-luck country. The Antilians, they’ve had their share of bad luck. But mainly, they’re just crazy.”

  Crazy.

  In the scroll case with my orders was the portrait of Dos Orsos, with those fixed black eyes. I looked into them and tried to decide whether crazy was what I saw there – crazy, or one of Araki and Kawabata’s precise, medicalizing euphemisms: schizophrenia, paranoia, psychosis.

  Or, more quaintly, madness.

  It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen those things. In that South Siamese refugee camp I’d seen a Chinese girl, no taller than my shoulder and not much more than half my weight, run amok with a bayonet and kill six Malay paramilitaries. In Axum, I’d known a doctor from Shizuoka who would chalk the floor of every room he slept in with the outlines of tatami mats, and who couldn’t sleep if his pallet overlapped one of the lines.

  But when I met Dos Orsos’ thermal-printed gaze, I saw something else. Something I’d seen, maybe, in the eyes of volunteers who’d keep digging long after there was any chance of finding survivors in the rubble, of nurses who gave their best and most gentle care to the patients it was too late to save.

  It was – I told myself – the look I saw sometimes in the mirror.

  I was right about that, but I was wrong, too.

  – from the pillow book of Doctor-Lieutenant Chië Nakada

  They rounded a headland, passed through a narrows, entered a wide, brackish lake, the far shore invisible in the subtropical haze. Not long after that, they saw the first body.

  “What’s that?” asked Ishino. Ishino was the boat’s other nurse, an Okinawan boy not much more than Hayashi’s age. His face was the face of a pop star: a naïve, almost feminine handsomeness, with a hint of rebellion that looked as though his heart wasn’t really in it.

  “What’s it look like?” asked Nakada.

  The body, what was visible above water, was naked, burned black and hairless. There was no way to tell whether it had been man or woman, Antilian or Andalusian, young or old.

  “Oh,” said Hayashi.

  “Plenty more where we’re going,” Nakada said, and closed her eyes. Her head still hurt. The conscientious subaltern had confiscated the opium from her formulary kit. So far she’d stayed out of the boat’s opium chest, but it was getting harder. There was a Pure Land food camp north of the city. She thought she could hold out till there.

  She heard Ishino chanting in a low voice, and recognized a Nichiren prayer for the dead. When he’d finished, Shiraoka powered up the fans and deployed the ground-effect skirt,
and they quickly left the body behind.

  They followed the curve of the lakeshore; what Shiraoka’s charts marked as lakeshore, a shining expanse of water broken by the green humps of drowned trees. They were moving against the current. The current, river water from the Acuamagna cutting itself a new path to the sea over Espírito Santo’s breached levees and through its burst canals, was a plume of brown mud spotted with the pale bellies of dead fish. Where the charts said dikes should divide the lake from the farms south of the city, there was only open water and, here and there, a boil of yellow foam surrounding the humped rooftops of a drowned village.

  Gradually, the flooded farms gave way to flooded shantytowns, the suburbs of Espírito Santo. From the corrugated rooftops of boxy cinderblock huts, flat-faced Antilians watched the passing ambulance boat with hooded eyes. A lone yellow Ministry flatboat moved among them, small blue figures passing barrels of water up onto the rooftops. There were many more huts than barrels.

  As they neared the city, something large and gold glittered on the shore.

  “What’s that?” Ishino asked.

  “Looks like a Buddha,” Hayashi reported, peering through a glass.

  “Give me the glass,” Nakada said. Hayashi handed it up, and Nakada peered through it. “Kanzeon,” she said.

  Kanzeon, Guanshi Yin, Kwannon – the thousand-armed, syncretic embodiment of mercy, equal parts Avalokiteshvara-bodhisattva and South Chinese mother-goddess – gazed benevolently at Nakada through the glass, her meter-wide smile, like the rest of her, a glitter of gold-flake plastic in the sun. Workers in Ministry blue had rolled the statue off a barge and were now hauling it upright at the top of a long ramp, turning it to look over a field of saffron-yellow tents. Beyond them Nakada saw a collection of boxy concrete buildings of increasing size, culminating in a two-hundred-meter dome, its sliding roof a patchwork of broken girders and tattered sheet metal. As she watched, a coleopter rose up from beyond the dome and whirred away over the lake.

  Nakada lowered the glass. The Kanzeon’s smiling face, the thousand arms spread out around and behind her like the wings of a Persian angel, were clearly visible now even without it.

  Shiraoka eyed the golden statue and shook his head. “Pure Landers, always asking for trouble,” he said.

  “We’ll tell the Christians it’s the Virgin Mary,” said Nakada.

  The buildings belonged to a crumbling sports complex of which the food camp occupied one end, the yellow tarps and tents shading expanses of cracked asphalt and pools of stagnant water. Dilapidated concrete edifices frowned over them, structures that perhaps had been grandiose thirty years ago, but that now, amid the flooded shantytowns, seemed merely pathetic.

  The ambulance boat pulled up on a long white tiled plaza at the edge of a concrete spillway, a diversion of lake water made, Nakada supposed, for the staging of aquatic events; there was a diving tower on the opposite bank, and on this side tiered rows of steel spectators’ benches, stacked high now with supply baskets. Flatboats, an uninterrupted stream of them, were unloading dazed Antilians. Between them, sunlight glittered dully off water opaque as green paint.

  As the boat’s fans spun down, Nakada breathed deeply in through her nostrils, held the breath for a moment, then let it slowly out through her lips. There was a familiar tang in the air, overriding the wet living smell of the water: a perfume compounded of fuel oil and raw sewage, the emblematic scent of the developing world. Nakada breathed it in again and smiled.

  “Give me the chart,” she said to Shiraoka. “I’m going to find the camp chief.” She hopped down onto the tiles. “See if I can get us some directions.”

  Somewhere in the direction of the gold Kanzeon, there was shouting, and then the sound of a gunshot.

  “Take someone with you,” Shiraoka said, passing down the chart.

  “I’ll go,” said Hayashi.

  Nakada and Hayashi headed up the concrete slope toward the commotion.

  “This your first tour?” Nakada asked.

  “Sure is,” the young nurse said. As they walked she looked around the camp with alert interest, like a studious child on her first visit to an amusement park, not sure yet whether all the costumed characters and the lights and the rides were really for her. Nakada supposed that there were probably more people in the shuffling line of refugees beside them than Hayashi had ever seen in her life before being drafted for the Ministry.

  “Is that thing real?” Hayashi asked, looking up at the thirty-meter Kanzeon statue. “It looks like plastic.”

  Nakada shrugged. “Plastic’s as real as bronze, I suppose.”

  They reached the processing desk at the head of the line, and the source of the disturbance. A line of Japanese police in lacquered half-armor held back a crowd that seemed to consist mostly of Andalusian soldiers. As orderlies passed food and water to the Antilian refugees and directed them toward the tents, a red-bearded Andalusian officer, his Varangian accent so thick that Nakada wasn’t at first sure that he was speaking Arabic, was arguing with a Relief Ministry worker. The relief worker wore a sleeveless black monk’s tunic over his blue uniform, with a white rope belt and a Nutritionist-Sergeant’s patch.

  “Look, your Lordship,” the nutritionist said in sarcastic Japanese, “you morons are going to have to wait your turn — ”

  Nakada tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey,” she said. “Where can I find the camp chief?”

  The nutritionist turned. “Do I look like a tour guide?” Then he registered Nakada’s rank. “Sorry, Doctor. Try the — ”

  The Andalusian chose that moment to take a pistol from his belt and fire a shot in the air.

  “That’s it!” said the nutritionist, disgusted. As the Andalusian started to lower the pistol, the nutritionist grabbed his wrist. In a single motion he threw the man to the ground and took the pistol away, following up with a stomp to the solar plexus. There was a splash as the nutritionist threw the pistol over a railing into the canal.

  The Andalusian soldiers yelled and surged toward the desk, and the Japanese police waded into the crowd, iron sword-breakers and wooden batons rising and falling.

  “The camp chief?” Nakada repeated.

  “Try the coliseum,” the nutritionist said.

  “Thanks,” said Nakada, but the nutritionist’s attention was already back on the melee.

  “Get them settled down!” he yelled. “We’ve got work to do!”

  As Nakada and Hayashi left, the nurse said, “I thought the soldiers were supposed to stay out of the camps.”

  “That only works when they’re winning,” Nakada said. “And sometimes not even then.”

  The coliseum had been converted into an infirmary. Its floor was a miniature tent city all by itself, crowded with hammocks and folding cots, the occupants mostly women and children. Hayashi read off the chalked symbols on the boards hung from each cot, looking for any interesting conditions, but Nakada could see that mainly it was just malnutrition, dehydration, and the occasional dysentery.

  Then they reached the burn ward. Hayashi, fascinated, moved among patients swathed in bandages, patients whose raw skin would not abide a bandage’s touch, patients whose skin was striped white and black in the patterns of the clothes they had been wearing when the bomb’s light reached them.

  Nakada checked the prescriptions, and the contents of the formulary carts that stood at the end of every third or fourth row of patients. The Pure Land food camp was just that; it had never been intended to handle a medical emergency of this scale. But eventually, on the bottom shelf of one of the last carts, Nakada found what she was looking for.

  Just at that moment, Hayashi said: “Is that the camp chief?”

  Nakada slipped the packet into her sleeve and stood up.

  Abbot-Doctor Shingen was a tower of a man, two heads taller than Nakada, his shaven skull massive as a temple bell. He was supervising the installation of another statue, a smaller one, not Kanzeon this time but the Amida buddha.

  “That’s
the way!” he boomed at the monks who worked with wedges and levers to place the statue – gilded bronze, not the Kanzeon’s plastic – and its wooden pedestal. “Right up under the scoreboards!” He looked down as Nakada approached. “Yes?”

  “Sir.” Nakada bowed, and proffered the scroll case with her orders. “I’m bound upriver, on a special assignment. I’m told I can cross over to the Acuamagna here.”

  “What?” Shingen said, ignoring the case. “No, you can’t cross here. In case you haven’t heard, this is a disaster area.” He waved a hand at the rows of hammocks and cots. “What do you want to go upriver for? Why don’t you make yourself useful here?”

  Still holding the case out, Nakada persisted. “I’m on a special assignment for Doctor-General Araki, sir. My orders are to cross over to the Acuamagna here and proceed upriver.”

  Shingen scowled. “Araki? What’s she want?” He took the case, snapped it open, unrolled enough of the scroll inside to read the header, then rolled the scroll up again and stuffed it into the case again, handing it back to Nakada.

  “I haven’t heard anything about it,” he said.

  Nakada put the case away, exchanging it for the laminated chart. “Sir,” she began, “city map shows the river and the lake connected by these canals, here and here — ”

  The monk glanced at the chart, followed Nakada’s pointing finger. “You don’t want to go up there,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “It’s all looters up there,” Shingen said. “Aborigines, cultists, Andalusian deserters, swamp cannibals. We get all kinds. It was bad enough up there before the bomb, but now it’s a real mess.” He glanced up at something beyond Nakada. “Over here!” he called out.

  Nakada turned to see an NKK film crew, weighed down with cameras and recording gear and spare film reels and audio cylinders, picking its way through the burn ward.

  “It’s no good,” said Shingen to Nakada. “Wait till the Eleventh gets here and we can re-establish control of the city, that’s my advice.”