The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  “Mwapoleni baChiti,” he said quietly. The old man leaned forward and grasped him by the shoulders first, and then lifted Jason’s head with a delicate touch. His hair was turning white, like frosted charcoal. He smiled. “Cungulo baJason. Whoever called you Jason probably hadn’t read the right stories,” he said. There was the sound of a tiny bell. The chief looked at his wristwatch and said, “Sorry – I really need to take this call,” and dismissed Jason with a flick of his fingers.

  ChiBemba, the language of the Bemba people of northern Zambia and half the Congo was a difficult language if you weren’t born to it, inflected at both ends of a word, about seven noun cases, and hundreds of greetings, proverbs and forms of abuse. What other language had a single word meaning may your grandmother’s vagina be opened wide and stuffed with sand? He was grateful for the chiefs use of English; but then they all spoke perfect English most of the time, except when speaking to him.

  Jason walked over to the flyer. A hatch opened in the side of the knuckle end of the “bone” and the pilot looked out. He pointed at Jason, tugged at his own shirt, and said, “Fuleni.” Jason was suddenly aware of about a dozen people standing and watching him. As he stripped he didn’t care much about most of them. He was only embarrassed that his mentor, Miriam, should see him naked. He was pleased to see that she averted her eyes.

  He turned and walked naked up to the steps of the flyer, then turned back and retrieved the stone tool that he’d dropped.

  It had been a long hard journey to get here from ravaged England through war-torn Europe, through the Balkans and down the Greek mainland. He remembered it only too well, and the worst was the two days and nights he’d spent spewing his guts up into the Mediterranean . . .

  Was it like this for the Argonauts? Did the ancient Jason hang onto the side of a Greek fishing boat and vomit into the dark blue Aegean? Did heroes suffer the same indignities as refugees? Jason’s stomach was empty and only the last traces of bile retched out to feed the fish.

  At least Kostas Kiriakos, the owner and captain of this boat, had the intelligence not to overload it. They turned south from Paleochora and headed down from the Mediterranean off southern Crete into the Libyan Sea. Jason’s intelligence was malfunctioning, he realised; he had become completely subject to the whims of his inner ears. He was a slug, or a cockroach, or a tortoise, but not a human and certainly not, for these interminable hours, a physicist.

  The ocean was piled up in rolling ultramarine white-topped waves and the boat was rotating in unpredictable ways. Kostas didn’t seem bothered by this, and stuck lamb souvlaki under the grill in the galley. The smell of hot lamb and onions swept over the seventeen men and women clutching the gunnels, causing a chain-reaction of stomach spasms to grip the refugees.

  Jason let go of the side of the boat and lurched towards the galley, targeting the door frame and managing to grasp it. Kostas looked up, smiled and held up a piece of barbecued lamb. “Eat,” he said. “You’ll feel better. An empty gut is a bad thing.” Jason forced himself to take the meat and began to chew it. So far, so good. It was a long way to the Libyan coast and he knew he must eat. East of the boat the hills of Gavdos Island seemed to rise above the wave crests and then drop. They were passing the most southerly outpost of Europe. Greece had survived the catastrophic and chaotic collapse of the EU, the two and a half metre rise in sea level when the Antarctic ice shelf melted, better than most. The sandy beaches of lonely Gavdos were gone, the island had shrunk a little, but the goats had never signed up for civilisation anyway. True, Athens was a disaster zone, but throughout the mountains of the Peloponnesian region, down the islands of the Aegean, the Sporades, on Lesvos and Crete, the Greeks simply threw away their mobile phones and went back to shouting. When civilisation collapses, those closest to their peasant roots survive.

  Kostas dropped them at a small Libyan jetty just before dawn, waved, put the engines into reverse, and backed out into the darkness. He’d been well paid in gold and diamonds. He’d fulfilled his side of the bargain, he’d delivered them to this isolated bluff, but he could not give them anything more than a microscopic fragment of hope for their future. He put them into the hands of the Fates, the Moirai, the deciders of the immutable track of destiny for gods and men, set the boat on a northerly course, poured some of his mother’s dark red fruity wine from a goat skin into a cup, sipped, and then tossed a small libation into the ocean. It was the least he could do.

  The promised refugee-smuggling transport didn’t arrive. They stood together on the jetty and waited, hungry, thirsty, apprehensive in the darkness. Eventually the headlights came. They were rounded up by an armed Libyan border patrol, herded onto the back of a lorry, and taken to a holding pen outside the refugee camp at Cyrene for interrogation. The guards gave them water, couscous and olives. They were all tense and nervous. Jason picked at the olives and felt an overwhelming sense of despair, apprehension, anger and guilt. He had run away. He should have stayed with his dead friends and his dead wife and his dead science and raged and burned his way into the inevitable darkness of chaos and death.

  The officer, a lean man in his forties with a neat moustache, checked Jason’s iris scan against the image stored on his passport and sat back.

  “Most people throw their passports away, Professor Johns. Why bring it here?”

  “To prove who I am,” said Jason.

  “But why come?”

  “Twenty kilos of Semtex in my laboratory. Six of my colleagues shot. This is not the best time to be a scientist in Europe. I’m sure somebody on this continent can find a use for me.”

  “Perhaps. Until then, I’m afraid, even scientists have to dig.”

  Jason felt fear overwhelm him. He wanted to run. He wanted to scream.

  The officer locked a transponder bracelet around Jason’s wrist, pointed to the door, and turned to his computer and made a note on the file.

  Suddenly Jason felt the fear, guilt and anger curl up and compress themselves into something like an itch in his right arm.

  The ship from Libya to Dar es Salaam had been crowded and filthy. Here, in the hills of Tanzania, they weren’t badly treated, but the work was hard. The cage went down the shaft at high speed, still lurching as it braked at the bottom and the gate opened. There were twin tunnels under construction. Jason climbed with the others from the lift into a low train running up the wide water tunnel, twenty feet across, lit with bright points of LED light. He had a sudden vivid memory of the London Underground. Down-slope from here the tunnel descended in a shallow gradient for sixty miles to the Tanzanian coast near the southern town of Mtwara and then a further five miles under the Indian Ocean.

  Jason was working in the second, parallel, smaller tunnel, which would carry superconducting cables. These would bring current from the solar fusion plants five thousand feet up in Zambia to massive pumps along the water tunnel that would lift seawater three thousand feet to a desalination plant in the hills above Lake Malawi. There were sixteen systems like this, each tunnel emerging into the sea along the Tanzanian coast, and more in Mozambique. Power for water – it was a good barter.

  Africa was greening again. The evaporating lakes were filling. Rivers flowed. Irrigation ducts fed the fertile fields. All of this was because a remarkable breakthrough by the Zambians converted the sun’s rays into electricity at a phenomenal 98% efficiency. They weren’t telling anybody how they did it.

  Jason was working in a gang of six attaching steel lining plates to the superconducting tunnel and welding them into an airtight lining, preparing for the vacuum that was needed. The other five refugee workers were German, and rarely spoke to him, not because they didn’t speak English, but because they were all suppressed by their wrist bands. He’d hardly had anything amounting to a conversation with anybody since he embarked on his long and dangerous journey from England. He would have expected a camp of several hundred forced labourers to have a loud, violent culture, but it was more like a Sunday School camp. They didn’t sing;
they didn’t shout; they didn’t fight. They’d had an emotional epidural.

  A shift with sizzling blue welding arcs in his face was pretty sure to bring on a headache. He’d just finished a join and lowered the torch when he felt a tap on his shoulder. Mbanga, the site manager, gestured for him to follow.

  An hour later he was showered, dressed in clean shorts and shirt, and sitting in the comfort of a high speed maglev train, eating maize and curried fish, drinking cold beer, watching out of the window for the occasional glimpse of giraffe or elephants. He was on his way to the wealthiest country in the world. As the silent train rounded a banked curve at three hundred and twenty miles per hour the towering heights of Kilimanjaro came into view to the north. The summit was no longer snowy. The land around outside the train was sandy and dry with widely-spaced baobab trees standing with their enormously wide brown trunks out of proportion to the number of branches above them.

  A tall African, with an aquiline nose (legacy of the Arab slave traders who operated in this region in the nineteenth century) walked down the train and sat facing Jason. The suit was light blue and looked like class. His dark eyes met Jason’s light grey eyes across the table.

  “How’s the food, Professor Johns?”

  “Very good, thank you. And your name is?”

  “Not important. So. What do you think?”

  “About what, Mr. Not Important?”

  “Fair enough – the name’s Arisa. About your situation . . .” He took Jason’s passport from the inside pocket of his jacket and pushed it across the table.

  Jason left it where it was and wiped his mouth on the pressed white linen napkin. “I think I just prefer this patronising slavery to dirty bombs and marauding fascists.” He was trying to let the anger come, but it wouldn’t.

  “Not slavery. You chose to come. I don’t think my ancestors climbed on the ships and held up their hands for manacles.” He pointed to Jason’s wrist band. “We took you in. Millions of you. We feed you and give you beds and pillows and blankets. Look – even beer!”

  “What do you think of this train?”

  “It’s – impressive. But . . .”

  “What?”

  “If you put it inside a vacuum tunnel, you could double the speed.”

  “Phase two, Professor Johns.”

  He spoke quickly in Swahili to what seemed to be his watch. Instantly the train began to slow until it was not far above walking pace. Beyond a pair of baobab trees was a pile of black wreckage, sharp wing shards, engine nacelles, fragments of cockpit windshield. Jason recognised many of the parts. It was a shattered American stealth bomber. Dark stains spread out across the sand from the impact.

  “The Americans still don’t understand how the Zambians have shot down every missile and every nuclear attack plane.”

  Jason tried to be angry, but it was impossible. Stick to the rational, he told himself. There was a quick flicker of the memory of his wife’s bloody dead face. He pushed his plate aside. “It didn’t need to happen. You could have saved Europe and America if you’d shared the technology.”

  Arisa leaned back and laughed ironically. “We were starving. Did you help us? No. We were ravaged with disease. Did you help us? You turned the atmosphere against us, the rain stopped, the deserts spread like cancer, the crops and the livestock died, the lakes began to shrink, the young fish boiled until there were no more. Did you help us? Did you?”

  “No. But many of us wanted to.”

  “Not many enough. What you don’t know is that many of us would like to see a more generous regime. Here, in Tanzania. Not there in Zambia. It’s a local issue, but also maybe global. If we could have their solar fusion here we could do business with the Americans, the Chinese, the Indians, and even Europe. And you, Professor Johns, could have whatever you want. Learn what you can. And think about having your own research centre with unlimited resources. Now we approach the border. We will speak again. Kwa heri.”

  He eased out of the seat and walked towards the end of the compartment.

  “By the way – Arisa is a girl’s name. We have to be a bit careful. So do you. After a few hundred years of digging out copper for the white man the Bemba have remembered that they used to be warriors. Oh – and we would take the suppressor off your wrist.”

  Half an hour later the train slowed to a halt at the border crossing at Nakonde and an announcement on the PA system invited Jason and two other people to leave the train. It was like climbing out of the belly of a sleek, air-conditioned orange-green snake. Arisa, the man with a girl’s name, smiled from a window near the front of the train as it lifted from the black monorail and accelerated silently away towards the south. The air was warm and fresh in this vast central plateau of the continent, here at about five thousand feet NSL (New Sea Level). Jason walked up the platform behind a couple who looked as though they were from China or somewhere in the Far East. They pulled suitcases on wheels. Jason carried nothing.

  At the end of the platform, amongst a stand of eucalyptus trees, there were six arches of twisted filigree glass. The platform was embedded with small LED lights. Ahead of him a moving pattern of green lights ran from the feet of the Asians to the arch on the right. He carried on walking. Lights began to pulse below him towards the left-hand arch. He followed them.

  As he passed under the arch there was a sudden pulse of something like pain under his wrist band – halfway between an electric shock and an orgasm. He cried out in surprise. He was immobilised for a few seconds. And then, for the first time in his six months in Africa, the wrist band spoke to him – a deep musical contralto voice:

  “Welcome to Zambia, Dr. Johns. Take the path up to your left.”

  She was waiting over the brow of the hill, looking down at him, tall and narrow-waisted with a golden, red and green cloth wrapped around her, tied in a knot above her breasts. Her hair was a cap of short tight curls above dark brown eyes. His wrist ached, and he flicked his hand to shake the irritation away.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “When people cross the border it’s possible to get the biometric data less painfully, but it’s a bit slow and tedious. Come . . . Oh, let me introduce myself . . .”

  “I know who you are,” said Jason. “You may have switched off half of my brain function, but I can still recognise Dr. Miriam Bwalya when I see her.”

  She smiled and nodded a humble acceptance. He followed her across a tarmac car park to what turned out to be some kind of flyer, although it looked like a big pink plastic elephant in a children’s playground. Much to his surprise, he laughed out loud, and carried on laughing as he climbed the steps into its belly and sat beside her on a wide comfortable bench seat looking out of its huge eyes.

  “Do you do flying pigs as well?” he asked. “I can’t remember the last time I laughed. I didn’t think it was possible!”

  She laughed with him, perfect white teeth flashing. “We can do you a flying pig if you want one. You can even have a straight-edged, sharp, European-style, high-tech-looking little boys’ fighter plane, if you like. We tend to prefer curvy things. These are only shells, as you perfectly well realise.” She added a couple of words in a language he didn’t recognise, and the flyer lifted off vertically, and then drifted forward over the eucalyptus trees and away to the north, without making a sound. Curvy things definitely defined Dr. Bwalya, Jason thought irreverently.

  The Zambian breakthroughs in physics were well-guarded, but he knew he was sitting next to one of the key players. Miriam Bwalya was known to be a child prodigy who went on to become a formidable laser theorist. She was rumoured to be the architect of the solar fusion reaction that had lifted her country from a subsistence economy blessed with a few copper mines to a world-dominating power. And here he was, sitting next to her in a flying elephant, watching hills and trees rolling by below. Her physical presence was disturbing; he felt flickers of something sexual pushing against the constraints of the wrist-band’s grip.

  She waved a finger in front of
the grey surface below the eye windows, and the music started. African rumba. Long ago the slave traders took their human cargo from here to the Americas, and the slaves took with them the complex polyrhythm of their drums and marimbas, the antiphonal singing rising over the driving pulse of the percussion. They melded it with hymns and chain gang songs. And prodigal music child that needed a little re-education. This music made even the most inhibited, the most mind-bound, long to dance.

  “You’ve had a long, hard journey,” she said.

  “That’s for sure.”

  “It’s not quite over yet.”

  “I realise that,” he said. “If it was, you’d have cut this off my wrist by now.”

  “We’ve been attacked. We’ve been infiltrated. We’ve been subverted. We only tracked you yesterday, because the Libyans are holding a lot of stuff back. The Tanzanians didn’t get who you were until we asked for you. They had decided to keep you, but we cut their power for a few minutes and they saw reason. And then, of course, there was a man on the train.”

  Jason ignored this. “The flyer never goes above about two hundred feet,” he said, “from which I assume you’re using some form of magneto-dynamic field effect.”

  “It can go higher, but the energy cost rises exponentially. Why bother?”

  “Why bother with me?”

  She held up a fold of her chikwembe. “If you look closely, you’ll see a few loose loops. What seems perfect cloth has tiny imperfections. So it is with our physics. It’s just possible that you can tie off a few loops and close a few holes.”

  “Specifically?”

  “Specifically comes later.”

  Jason smiled ironically and said, “So what vaguely comes next?”

  The flyer dropped its trunk over a hillside, coasted down over the town of Mbala, and settled onto a landing strip beside the low white buildings of ZIAP, the Zambia Institute of Advanced Physics.