Year's Best SF 2

by David G. Hartwell

  A man appeared, from the darkness under the ruined gallery. He was tall. The rippled muscle of his chest, left bare by an unlaced leather jerkin, shone red-brown. His black hair fell in glossy curls to his wide shoulders. He met her gaze and smiled, white teeth appearing in the darkness of his beard. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings…look on my works, ye mighty, and despair…Do you know those lines?” He pointed to a lump of shapeless stone, one of several that lay about. It bore traces of carving, almost effaced by time. “There was a city here once, with market-places, fine buildings, throngs of proud people. Now they are dust, and only the caravanserai remains.”

  He stood before her, one tanned and sinewy hand resting lightly on the hilt of a dagger in his belt. Like Sonja, he carried his broadsword on his back. Sonja was tall. He topped her by a head: yet there was nothing brutish in his size. His brow was wide and serene, his eyes were vivid blue: his lips full and imperious; yet delicately modeled, in the rich nest of hair. Somewhere between eyes and lips there lurked a spirit of mockery, as if he found some secret amusement in the perfection of his own beauty and strength.

  The man and the woman measured each other.

  “You are a scholar,” she said.

  “Of some sort. And a traveler from an antique land—where the cities are still standing. It seems we are the only strangers here,” he added, with a slight nod toward the convivial company. “We might be well advised to become friends for the night.”

  Sonja never wasted words. She considered his offer and nodded.

  They made a fire in the booth Sonja had chosen. Lemiak and the scholar's terror-bird, left loose together in the back of the shelter, did not seem averse to each other's company. The woman and the man ate spiced sausage, skewered and broiled over the red embers, with bread and dried fruit. They drank water, each keeping to their own waterskin. They spoke little, after that first exchange—except to discuss briefly the tactics of their defense, should defense be necessary.

  The attack came around midnight. At the first stir of covert movement, Sonja leapt up sword in hand. She grasped a brand from the dying fire. The man who had been crawling on his hands and knees toward her, bent on sly murder of a sleeping victim, scrabbled to his feet. “Defend yourself,” yelled Sonja, who despised to strike an unarmed foe. Instantly he was rushing at her with a heavy sword. A great two-handed stroke would have cleft her to the waist. She parried the blow and caught him between neck and shoulder, almost severing the head from his body. The beasts plunged and screamed at the rush of blood scent. The scholar was grappling with another attacker, choking out the man's life with his bare hands…and the booth was full of bodies: their enemies rushing in on every side.

  Sonja felt no fear. Stroke followed stroke, in a luxury of blood and effort and fire-shot darkness…until the attack was over, as suddenly as it had begun.

  The brigands had vanished.

  “We killed five,” breathed the scholar, “by my count. Three to you, two to me.”

  She kicked together the remains of their fire and crouched to blow the embers to a blaze. By that light they found five corpses, dragged them and flung them into the open square. The scholar had a cut on his upper arm, which was bleeding freely. Sonja was bruised and battered, but otherwise unhurt. The worst loss was their woodstack, which had been trampled and blood-fouled. They would not be able to keep a watchfire burning.

  “Perhaps they won't try again,” said the warrior woman. “What can we have that's worth more than five lives?”

  He laughed shortly. “I hope you're right.”

  “We'll take turns to watch.”

  Standing breathless, every sense alert, they smiled at each other in new-forged comradeship. There was no second attack. At dawn Sonja, rousing from a light doze, sat up and pushed back the heavy masses of her red hair.

  “You are very beautiful,” said the man, gazing at her.

  “So are you,” she answered.

  The caravanserai was deserted, except for the dead. The brigands' riding animals were gone. The innkeeper and his family had vanished into some bolt-hole in the ruins.

  “I am heading for the mountains,” he said, as they packed up their gear. “For the pass into Zimiamvia.”

  “I too.”

  “Then our way lies together.”

  He was wearing the same leather jerkin, over knee-length loose breeches of heavy violet silk. Sonja looked at the strips of linen that bound the wound on his upper arm. “When did you tie up that cut?”

  “You dressed it for me, for which I thank you.”

  “When did I do that?”

  He shrugged. “Oh, sometime.”

  Sonja mounted Lemiak, a little frown between her brows. They rode together until dusk. She was not talkative and the man soon accepted her silence. But when night fell, and they camped without a fire on the houseless plain: then, as the demons stalked, they were glad of each other's company. Next dawn, the mountains seemed as distant as ever. Again, they met no living creature all day, spoke little to each other, and made the same comfortless camp. There was no moon. The stars were almost bright enough to cast shadow; the cold was intense. Sleep was impossible, but they were not tempted to ride on. Few travelers attempt the passage over the high plains to Zimiamvia. Of those few most turn back, defeated. Some wander among the ruins forever, tearing at their own flesh. Those who survive are the ones who do not defy the terrors of darkness. They crouched shoulder to shoulder, each wrapped in a single blanket, to endure. Evil emanations of the death-steeped plain rose from the soil and bred phantoms. The sweat of fear was cold as ice melt on Sonja's cheeks. Horrors made of nothingness prowled and muttered in her mind.

  “How long,” she whispered. “How long do we have to bear this?”

  The man's shoulder lifted against hers. “Until we get well, I suppose.”

  The warrior-woman turned to face him, green eyes flashing in appalled outrage.

  “Sonja” discussed this group member's felony with the therapist. Dr. Hamilton—he wanted them to call him Jim, but “Sonja” found this impossible—monitored everything that went on in the virtual environment. But he never appeared there. They only met him in the one-to-one consultations that virtual-therapy buffs called the meat sessions.

  “He's not supposed to do that,” she protested, from the foam couch in the doctor's office. He was sitting beside her, his notebook on his knee. “He damaged my experience.”

  Dr. Hamilton nodded. “Okay. Let's take a step back. Leave aside the risk of disease or pregnancy: because we can leave those bogeys aside, forever if you like. Would you agree that sex is essentially an innocent and playful social behavior—something you'd offer to or take from a friend, in an ideal world, as easily as food or drink?”

  “Sonja” recalled certain dreams—meat dreams, not the computer-assisted kind. She blushed. But the man was a doctor after all. “That's what I do feel,” she agreed. “That's why I'm here. I want to get back to the pure pleasure, to get rid of the baggage.”

  “The sexual experience offered in virtuality therapy is readily available on the nets. You know that. And you could find an agency that would vet your partners for you. You chose to join this group because you need to feel that you're taking medicine, so you don't have to feel ashamed. And because you need to feel that you're interacting with people who, like yourself, perceive sex as a problem.”

  “Doesn't everyone?”

  “You and another group member went off into your own private world. That's good. That's what's supposed to happen. Let me tell you, it doesn't always. The software gives you access to a vast multisensual library, all the sexual fantasy ever committed to media. But you and your partner, or partners, have to customize the information and use it to create and maintain what we call the consensual perceptual plenum. Success in holding a shared dreamland together is a knack. It depends on something in the neural makeup that no one has yet fully analyzed. Some have it, some don't. You two are really in sync.”

 
“That's exactly what I'm complaining about—”

  “You think he's damaging the pocket universe you two built up. But he isn't, not from his character's point of view. It's part Lessingham's thing, to be conscious that he's in a fantasy world.”

  She started, accusingly. “I don't want to know his name.”

  “Don't worry, I wouldn't tell you. “Lessingham” is the name of his virtuality persona. I'm surprised you don't recognize it. He's a character from a series of classic fantasy novels by E.R. Eddison.…In Eddison's glorious cosmos “Lessingham” is a splendidly endowed English gentleman, who visits fantastic realms of ultra-masculine adventure as a lucid dreamer: though an actor in the drama, he is partly conscious of another existence, while the characters around him are more or less explicitly puppets of the dream…”

  He sounded as if he was quoting from a reference book. He probably was: reading from an autocue that had popped up in lenses of those doctorish horn-rims. She knew that the old-fashioned trappings were there to reassure her. She rather despised them: but it was like the virtuality itself. The buttons were pushed, the mechanism responded. She was reassured.

  Of course she knew the Eddison stories. She recalled “Lessingham” perfectly: the tall, strong, handsome, cultured millionaire jock, who has magic journeys to another world, where he is a tall, strong, handsome, cultured jock in Elizabethan costume, with a big sword. The whole thing was an absolutely typical male power-fantasy, she thought—without rancor. Fantasy means never having to say you're sorry. The women in those books, she remembered, were drenched in sex, but they had no part in the action. They stayed at home being princesses, occasionally allowing the millionaire jocks to get them into bed. She could understand why “Lessingham” would be interested in “Sonja”…for a change.

  “You think he goosed you, psychically. What do you expect? You can't dress the way ‘Sonja’ dresses, and hope to be treated like the Queen of the May.”

  Dr. Hamilton was only doing his job. He was supposed to be provocative, so they could react against him. That was his excuse, anyway.…On the contrary, she thought. “Sonja” dresses the way she does because she can dress any way she likes. “Sonja” doesn't have to hope for respect, and she doesn't have to demand it. She just gets it. “It's dominance display,” she said, enjoying the theft of his jargon. “Females do that too, you know. The way ‘Sonja’ dresses is not an invitation. It's a warning. Or a challenge, to anyone who can measure up.”

  He laughed, but he sounded irritated. “Frankly, I'm amazed that you two work together. I'd have expected ‘Lessingham’ to go for an ultrafeminine—”

  “I am…‘Sonja’ is ultrafeminine. Isn't a tigress feminine?”

  “Well, okay. But I guess you've found out his little weakness. He likes to be a teeny bit in control, even when he's letting his hair down in dreamland.”

  She remembered the secret mockery lurking in those blue eyes. “That's the problem. That's exactly what I don't want. I don't want either of us to be in control.”

  “I can't interfere with his persona. So, it's up to you. Do you want to carry on?”

  “Something works,” she muttered. She was unwilling to admit that there'd been no one else, in the text interface phase of the group, that she found remotely attractive. It was “Lessingham,” or drop out and start again. “I just want him to stop spoiling things.”

  “You can't expect your masturbation fantasies to mesh completely. This is about getting beyond solitary sex. Go with it: where's the harm? One day you'll want to face a sexual partner in the real, and then you'll be well. Meanwhile, you could be passing ‘Lessingham’ in reception—he comes to his meat sessions around your time—and not know it. That's safety, and you never have to breach it. You two have proved that you can sustain an imaginary world together: it's almost like being in love. I could argue that lucid dreaming, being in the fantasy world but not of it, is the next big step. Think about that.”

  The clinic room had mirrored walls: more deliberate provocation. How much reality can you take?, the reflections asked. But she felt only a vague distaste for the woman she saw, at once hollow-cheeked and bloated, lying in the doctor's foam couch. He was glancing over her records on his notebook screen: which meant the session was almost up.

  “Still no overt sexual contact?”

  “I'm not ready…” She stirred restlessly. “Is it a man or a woman?”

  “Ah!” smiled Dr. Hamilton, waving a finger at her. “Naughty, naughty—”

  He was the one who'd started taunting her, with his hints that the meat—“Lessingham”—might be near. She hated herself for asking a genuine question. It was her rule to give him no entry to her real thoughts. But Dr. Jim knew everything, without being told: every change in her brain chemistry, every effect on her body: sweaty palms, racing heart, damp underwear.…The telltales on his damned autocue left her precious little dignity. Why do I subject myself to this? she wondered, disgusted. But in the virtuality she forgot utterly about Dr. Jim. She didn't care who was watching. She had her brazen-hilted sword. She had the piercing intensity of dusk on the high plains, the snowlight on the mountains; the hard, warm silk of her own perfect limbs. She felt a brief complicity with “Lessingham.” She had a conviction that Dr. Jim didn't play favorites. He despised all his patients equally.…You get your kicks, doctor. But we have the freedom of dreamland.

  “Sonja” read cards stuck in phone booths and store windows, in the tired little streets outside the building that housed the clinic. Relaxing massage by clean-shaven young man in Luxurious Surroundings…You can't expect your fantasies to mesh exactly, the doctor said. But how can it work if two people disagree over something so vital as the difference between control and surrender? Her estranged husband used to say: “why don't you just do it for me, as a favor. It wouldn't hurt. Like making someone a cup of coffee…” Offer the steaming cup, turn around and lift my skirts, pull down my underwear. I'm ready. He opens his pants and slides it in, while his thumb is round in front rubbing me.…I could enjoy that, thought “Sonja,” remembering the blithe abandon of her dreams. That's the damned shame. If there were no nonsex consequences, I don't know that there's any limit to what I could enjoy.…But all her husband had achieved was to make her feel she never wanted to make anyone, man, woman, or child, a cup of coffee ever again.…In luxurious surroundings. That's what I want. Sex without engagement, pleasure without consequences. It's got to be possible.

  She gazed at the cards, feeling uneasily that she'd have to give up this habit. She used to glance at them sidelong, now she'd pause and linger. She was getting desperate. She was lucky there was medically supervised virtuality sex to be had. She would be helpless prey in the wild world of the nets, and she'd never, ever risk trying one of these meat-numbers. And she had no intention of returning to her husband. Let him make his own coffee. She wouldn't call that getting well. She turned, and caught the eye of a nicely dressed young woman standing next to her. They walked away quickly in opposite directions. Everybody's having the same dreams…

  In the foothills of the mountains, the world became green and sweet. They followed the course of a little river, that sometimes plunged far below their path, tumbling in white flurries in a narrow gorge; and sometimes ran beside them, racing smooth and clear over colored pebbles. Flowers clustered on the banks, birds darted in the thickets of wild rose and honeysuckle. They led their riding animals and walked at ease: not speaking much. Sometimes the warrior woman's flank would brush the man's side: or he would lean for a moment, as if by chance, his hand on her shoulder. Then they would move deliberately apart, but they would smile at each other. Soon. Not yet…

  They must be vigilant. The approaches to fortunate Zimiamvia were guarded. They could not expect to reach the pass unopposed. And the nights were haunted still. They made camp at a flat bend of the river, where the crags of the defile drew away, and they could see far up and down their valley. To the north, peaks of diamond and indigo reared above them. Their
fire of aromatic wood burned brightly, as the white stars began to blossom.

  “No one knows about the long-term effects,” she said. “It can't be safe. At the least, we're risking irreversible addiction, they warn you about that. I don't want to spend the rest of my life as a cyberspace couch potato.”

  “Nobody claims it's safe. If it was safe, it wouldn't be so intense.”

  Their eyes met. “Sonja's” barbarian simplicity combined surprisingly well with the man's more elaborate furnishing. The consensual perceptual plenum was a flawless reality: the sound of the river, the clear silence of the mountain twilight…their two perfect bodies. She turned from him to gaze into the sweet-scented flames. The warrior-woman's glorious vitality throbbed in her veins. The fire held worlds of its own, liquid furnaces: the sunward surface of Mercury.

  “Have you ever been to a place like this in the real?”

  He grimaced. “You're kidding. In the real, I'm not a magic-wielding millionaire.”

  Something howled. The bloodstopping cry was repeated. A taint of sickening foulness swept by them. They both shuddered, and drew closer together. “Sonja” knew the scientific explanation for the legendary virtuality-paranoia, the price you paid for the virtual world's superreal, dreamlike richness. It was all down to heightened neurotransmitter levels, a positive feedback effect, psychic overheating. But the horrors were still horrors.

  “The doctor says if we can talk like this, it means we're getting well.”

  He shook his head. “I'm not sick. It's like you said. Virtuality's addictive and I'm an addict. I'm getting my drug of choice safely, on prescription. That's how I see it.”