The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  “Oh, jumalauta,” Kosonen said. “That’s where it fell?”

  “Actually, no. I was just supposed to bring you here,” Pera said.

  “What?”

  “Sorry. I lied. It was like in Highlander: there is one of them left. And he wants to meet you.”

  Kosonen stared at Pera, dumbfounded. The pigeons landed on the other man’s shoulders and arms like a grey fluttering cloak. They seized his rags and hair and skin with sharp claws, wings started beating furiously. As Kosonen stared, Pera rose to the air.

  “No hard feelings, I just had a better deal from him. Thanks for the soup,” he shouted. In a moment, Pera was a black scrap of cloth in the sky.

  The earth shook. Kosonen fell to his knees. The window eyes that lined the street lit up, full of bright, malevolent light.

  He tried to run. He did not make it far before they came, the fingers of the city: the pigeons, the insects, a buzzing swarm that covered him. A dozen chimera rats clung to his skull, and he could feel the humming of their flywheel hearts. Something sharp bit through the bone. The pain grew like a forest fire, and Kosonen screamed.

  The city spoke. Its voice was a thunderstorm, words made from shaking of the earth and the sighs of buildings. Slow words, squeezed from stone.

  Dad, the city said.

  The pain was gone. Kosonen heard the gentle sound of waves, and felt a warm wind on his face. He opened his eyes.

  “Hi, Dad,” Esa said.

  They sat on the summerhouse pier, wrapped in towels, skin flushed from the sauna. It was evening, with a hint of chill in the air, Finnish summer’s gentle reminder that things were not forever. The sun hovered above the blue-tinted treetops. The lake surface was calm, full of liquid reflections.

  “I thought,” Esa said, “that you’d like it here.”

  Esa was just like Kosonen remembered him, a pale skinny kid, ribs showing, long arms folded across his knees, stringy wet hair hanging on his forehead. But his eyes were the eyes of a city, dark orbs of metal and stone.

  “I do,” Kosonen said. “But I can’t stay.”

  “Why not?”

  “There is something I need to do.”

  “We haven’t seen each other in ages. The sauna is warm. I’ve got some beer cooling in the lake. Why the rush?”

  “I should be afraid of you,” Kosonen said. “You killed people. Before they put you here.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” Esa said. “The plague does everything you want. It gives you things you don’t even know you want. It turns the world soft. And sometimes it tears it apart for you. You think a thought, and things break. You can’t help it.”

  The boy closed his eyes. “You want things too. I know you do. That’s why you are here, isn’t it? You want your precious words back.”

  Kosonen said nothing.

  “Mom’s errand boy, vittu. So they fixed your brain, flushed the booze out. So you can write again. Does it feel good? For a moment there I thought you came here for me. But that’s not the way it ever worked, was it?”

  “I didn’t know — ”

  “I can see the inside of your head, you know,” Esa said. “I’ve got my fingers inside your skull. One thought, and my bugs will eat you, bring you here for good. Quality time forever. What do you say to that?”

  And there it was, the old guilt. “We worried about you, every second, after you were born,” Kosonen said. “We only wanted the best for you.”

  It had seemed so natural. How the boy played with his machine that made other machines. How things started changing shape when you thought at them. How Esa smiled when he showed Kosonen the talking starfish that the machine had made.

  “And then I had one bad day.”

  “I remember,” Kosonen said. He had been home late, as usual. Esa had been a diamond tree, growing in his room. There were starfish everywhere, eating the walls and the floor, making more of themselves. And that was only the beginning.

  “So go ahead. Bring me here. It’s your turn to make me into what you want. Or end it all. I deserve it.”

  Esa laughed softly. “And why would I do that, to an old man?” He sighed. “You know, I’m old too now. Let me show you.” He touched Kosonen’s shoulder gently and

  Kosonen was the city. His skin was stone and concrete, pores full of the godplague. The streets and buildings were his face, changing and shifting with every thought and emotion. His nervous system was diamond and optic fibre. His hands were chimera animals.

  The firewall was all around him, in the sky and in the cold bedrock, insubstantial but adamantine, squeezing from every side, cutting off energy, making sure he could not think fast. But he could still dream, weave words and images into threads, make worlds out of the memories he had and the memories of the smaller gods he had eaten to become the city. He sang his dreams in radio waves, not caring if the firewall let them through or not, louder and louder—

  “Here,” Esa said from far away. “Have a beer.”

  Kosonen felt a chilly bottle in his hand, and drank. The dream-beer was strong and real. The malt taste brought him back. He took a deep breath, letting the fake summer evening wash away the city.

  “Is that why you brought me here? To show me that?” he asked.

  “Well, no,” Esa said, laughing. His stone eyes looked young, suddenly. “I just wanted you to meet my girlfriend.”

  The quantum girl had golden hair and eyes of light. She wore many faces at once, like a Hindu goddess. She walked to the pier with dainty steps. Esa’s summerland showed its cracks around her: there were fracture lines in her skin, with otherworldly colours peeking out.

  “This is Säde,” Esa said.

  She looked at Kosonen, and spoke, a bubble of words, a superposition, all possible greetings at once.

  “Nice to meet you,” Kosonen said.

  “They did something right when they made her, up there,” said Esa. “She lives in many worlds at once, thinks in qubits. And this is the world where she wants to be. With me.” He touched her shoulder gently. “She heard my songs and ran away.”

  “Marja said she fell,” Kosonen said. “That something was broken.”

  “She said what they wanted her to say. They don’t like it when things don’t go according to plan.”

  Säde made a sound, like the chime of a glass bell.

  “The firewall keeps squeezing us,” Esa said. “That’s how it was made. Make things go slower and slower here, until we die. Säde doesn’t fit in here, this place is too small. So you will take her back home, before it’s too late.” He smiled. “I’d rather you do it than anyone else.”

  “That’s not fair,” Kosonen said. He squinted at Säde. She was too bright to look at. But what can I do? I’m just a slab of meat. Meat and words.

  The thought was like a pinecone, rough in his grip, but with a seed of something in it.

  “I think there is a poem in you two,” he said.

  Kosonen sat on the train again, watching the city stream past. It was early morning. The sunrise gave the city new hues: purple shadows and gold, ember colours. Fatigue pulsed in his temples. His body ached. The words of a poem weighed down on his mind.

  Above the dome of the firewall he could see a giant diamond starfish, a drone of the sky people, watching, like an outstretched hand.

  They came to see what happened, he thought. They’ll find out.

  This time, he embraced the firewall like a friend, and its tingling brightness washed over him. And deep within, the stern-voiced watchman came again. It said nothing this time, but he could feel its presence, scrutinising, seeking things that did not belong in the outside world.

  Kosonen gave it everything.

  The first moment when he knew he had put something real on paper. The disappointment when he realised that a poet was not much in a small country, piles of cheaply printed copies of his first collection, gathering dust in little bookshops. The jealousy he had felt when Marja gave birth to Esa, what a pale shadow of that giv
ing birth to words was. The tracks of the elk in the snow and the look in its eyes when it died.

  He felt the watchman step aside, satisfied.

  Then he was through. The train emerged into the real, undiluted dawn. He looked back at the city, and saw fire raining from the starfish. Pillars of light cut through the city in geometric patterns, too bright to look at, leaving only white-hot plasma in their wake.

  Kosonen closed his eyes and held on to the poem as the city burned.

  Kosonen planted the nanoseed in the woods. He dug a deep hole in the half-frozen peat with his bare hands, under an old tree stump. He sat down, took off his cap, dug out his notebook, and started reading. The pencil-scrawled words glowed bright in his mind, and after a while he didn’t need to look at them anymore.

  The poem rose from the words like a titanic creature from an ocean, first showing just a small extremity but then soaring upwards in a spray of glossolalia, mountain-like. It was a stream of hissing words and phonemes, an endless spell that tore at his throat. And with it came the quantum information from the microtubules of his neurons, where the bright-eyed girl now lived, and jagged impulses from synapses where his son was hiding.

  The poem swelled into a roar. He continued until his voice was a hiss. Only the nanoseed could hear, but that was enough. Something stirred under the peat.

  When the poem finally ended, it was evening. Kosonen opened his eyes. The first thing he saw were the sapphire antlers, sparkling in the last rays of the sun.

  Two young elk looked at him. One was smaller, more delicate, and its large brown eyes held a hint of sunlight. The other was young and skinny, but wore its budding antlers with pride. It held Kosonen’s gaze, and in its eyes he saw shadows of the city. Or reflections in a summer lake, perhaps.

  They turned around and ran into the woods, silent, fleet-footed and free.

  Kosonen was opening the cellar door when the rain came back. It was barely a shower this time: the droplets formed Marja’s face in the air. For a moment he thought he saw her wink. Then the rain became a mist, and was gone. He propped the door open.

  The squirrels stared at him from the trees curiously.

  “All yours, gentlemen,” Kosonen said. “Should be enough for next winter. I don’t need it anymore.”

  Otso and Kosonen left at noon, heading north. Kosonen’s skis slid along easily in the thinning snow. The bear pulled a sledge loaded with equipment. When they were well away from the cabin, it stopped to sniff at a fresh trail.

  “Elk,” it growled. “Otso is hungry. Kosonen shoot an elk. Need meat for the journey. Kosonen did not bring enough booze.”

  Kosonen shook his head.

  “I think I’m going to learn to fish,” he said.

  LIBERTARIAN RUSSIA

  Michael Swanwick

  Michael Swa]wick made his debut in 1980 and, in the thirty-one years that have followed, has established himself as one of SF’s most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Asimov’s Readers’ Award poll. In 1991, his novel Stations of the Tide won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1996 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story “Radio Waves.” He’s won the Hugo Award five times between 1999 and 2006, for his stories “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” “The Dog Said Bow-Wow,” “Slow Life,” and “Legions In Time.” His other books include the novels In The Drift, Vacuum Flowers, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, ]ack Faust, and Bones of the Earth. His short fiction has been assembled in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures, Michael Swanwick’s Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna, and The Periodic Table of Science Fiction. His most recent books are the novel The Dragons of Babel, and a massive retrospective collection, The Best of Michael Swanwick. Coming up is a new novel, Dancing with Bears. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter. He has a Web site at: www.michaelswanwick.com.

  Here he takes us to a depopulated future Russia that’s been through a semi-apocalypse for a hard-edged look at a young man learning the hard way how his political ideals would work out in practice in the real world.

  MILES AND WEEKS passed under the wheels of Victor’s motorcycle. Sometime during the day he would stop at a peasant farmstead and buy food to cook over a campfire for supper. At night he slept under the stars with old cowboy movies playing in his head. In no particular hurry he wove through the Urals on twisting backcountry roads, and somewhere along the way crossed over the border out of Europe and into Asia. He made a wide detour around Yekaterinburg, where the density of population brought government interference in the private lives of its citizens up almost to Moscow levels, and then cut back again to regain the laughably primitive transcontinental highway. He was passing through the drab ruins of an industrial district at the edge of the city when a woman in thigh-high boots raised her hand to hail him, the way they did out here in the sticks where every driver was a potential taxi to be bought for small change.

  Ordinarily, Victor wouldn’t have stopped. But in addition to the boots the woman wore leopard-print hot pants and a fashionably puffy red jacket, tight about the waist and broad at the shoulders, which opened to reveal the tops of her breasts, like two pomegranates proffered on a plate. A vinyl backpack crouched on the ground by her feet. She looked like she’d just stepped down from a billboard. She looked like serious trouble.

  It had been a long time since he’d had any serious trouble. Victor pulled to a stop.

  “Going east?” the woman said.

  “Yeah.”

  She glanced down at the scattering of pins on his kevleather jacket – politicians who never got elected, causes that were never won – and her crimson lips quirked in the smallest of smiles. “Libertarianski, eh? You do realize that there’s no such thing as a libertarian Russian? It’s like a gentle tiger or an honest cop – a contradiction in terms.”

  Victor shrugged. “And yet, here I am.”

  “So you think.” Suddenly all business, the woman said, “I’ll blow you if you take me with you.”

  For a second Victor’s mind went blank. Then he said, “Actually, I might be going a long way. Across Siberia. I might not stop until I reach the Pacific.”

  “Okay, then. Once a day, so long as I’m with you. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  Victor reconfigured the back of his bike to give it a pillion and an extra rack for her backpack and fattened the tires to compensate for her weight. She climbed on behind him, and off they went.

  At sunset, they stopped and made camp in a scrub pine forest, behind the ruins of a Government Auto Inspection station. After they’d set up their puptents (hers was the size of her fist when she took it from her knapsack but assembled itself into something almost palatial; his was no larger than he needed) and built the cookfire, she paid him for the day’s ride. Then, as he cut up the chicken he’d bought earlier, they talked.

  “You never told me your name,” Victor said.

  “Svetlana.”

  “Just Svetlana?”

  “Yes.”

  “No patronymic?”

  “No. Just Svetlana. And you?”

  “Victor Pelevin.”

  Svetlana laughed derisively. “Oh, come on!”

  “He’s my grandfather,” Victor explained. Then, when the scorn failed to leave her face, “Well, spiritually, anyway. I’ve read all his books I don’t know how many times. They shaped me.”

  “I prefer The Master and Margarita. Not the book, of course. The video. But I can’t say it shaped me. So, let me guess. You’re on the great Russian road trip. Looking to find the real Russia, old Russia, Mother Russia, the Russia of the heart. Eh?”

  “Not me. I’ve already found what I’m looking for – Libertarian Russia. Right here, where we are.” Victor finished with the chicken, and began cutting up the veget
ables. It would take a while for the fire to die down to coals, but when it was ready, he’d roast the vegetables and chicken together on spits, shish kabob style.

  “Now that you’ve found it, what are you going to do with it?”

  “Nothing. Wander around. Live here. Whatever.” He began assembling the kabobs. “You see, after the Depopulation, there just weren’t the resources anymore for the government to police the largest country in the world with the sort of control they were used to. So instead of easing up on the people, they decided to concentrate their power in a handful of industrial and mercantile centers, port cities, and the like. The rest, with a total population of maybe one or two people per ten square miles, they cut loose. Nobody talks about it, but there’s no law out here except what people agree upon. They’ve got to settle their differences among themselves. When you’ve got enough people to make up a town, they might pool their money to hire a part-time cop or two. But no databases, no spies . . . you can do what you like, and so long as you don’t infringe upon somebody else’s freedoms, they’ll leave you alone.”

  Everything Victor said was more or less cut-and-paste from “Free Ivan,” an orphan website he’d stumbled on five years ago. In libertarian circles, Free Ivan was a legend. Victor liked to think he was out somewhere in Siberia, living the life he’d preached. But since his last entry was posted from St. Petersburg and mentioned no such plans, most likely he was dead. That was what happened to people who dared imagine a world without tyranny.

  “What if somebody else’s idea of freedom involves taking your motorcycle from you?”

  Victor got up and patted the contact plate on his machine. “The lock is coded to my genome. The bike won’t start for anybody else. Anyway, I have a gun.” He showed it, then put it back in his shoulder harness.