The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Here’s another thing about addicts—you never get rid of it. All you do is replace one addiction with another. The best you can hope for is that it’s a better addiction. Some become god-addicts, some throw themselves into worthy deeds, or self-improvement, or fine thoughts, or helping others, god help us all. Me, my lovely little vice is sloth—I really am an idle little bugger. It’s so easy, letting the seasons slip away; slothful days and indolent nights, coughing my life up one chunk at a time. For Arthur, it was the visions. Arthur saw wonders and horrors, angels and demons, hopes and fears. True visions—the things that drive men to glory or death. Visionary visions. It lay up on the altiplano, beyond the twists and turns of the Ten Thousand Steps. I could never comprehend what it was, but it drove him. Devoured him. Ate his sleep, ate his appetite, ate his body and his soul and his sanity.

  It was worse in the Great Night … Everything’s worse in the Great Night. The snow would come swirling down the staircase and he saw things in it—faces—heard voices. The faces and voices of the people who had died, up there on the altiplano. He had to follow them, go up, into the Valley of the Kilns, where he would ask the people to forgive him—or kill him.

  And he went. I couldn’t stop him—I didn’t want to stop him. Can you understand that? I watched him from this very belvedere. The pelerines are not our warders, any of us is free to leave at any time, though I’ve never seen anyone leave but Arthur. He left in the evening, with the lilac light catching Gloaming Peak. He never looked back. Not a glance to me. I watched him climb the steps to that bend there. That’s where I lost sight of him. I never saw or heard of him again. But stories come down the stairs with the stickmen and they make their way even to this little eyrie, stories of a seer—a visionary. I look and I imagine I see smoke rising, up there on the altiplano.

  It’s a pity you won’t be here to see the clouds break around the Gloaming, or look at the stars.

  * * *

  V genetric nives: Mother-of-snows (direct translation from Thent). Ground-civer hi-alpine of the Exx Palisades. The plant forms extensive carpets of thousands of minute white blossoms.

  The most intricate papercut in the Botanica Veneris. Each floret is three millimetres in diameter. Paper, ink, gouache.

  * * *

  A high-stepping spider-car took me up the Ten Thousand Steps, past caravans of stickmen, spines bent, shoulders warped beneath brutal loads of finest porcelain.

  The twelve cuts of the Botanica Veneris I have given to the Princess, along with descriptions and botanical notes. She would not let me leave, clung to me, wracked with great sobs of loss and fear. It was dangerous; a sullen land with Great Night coming. I could not convince her of my reason for heading up the stairs alone, for they did not convince even me. The one, true reason I could not tell her. Oh, I have been despicable to her! My dearest friend, my love. But worse even than that, false.

  She stood watching my spider-car climb the steps until a curve in the staircase took me out of her sight. Must the currency of truth always be falsehood?

  Now I think of her spreading her long hair out, and brushing it, firmly, directly, beautifully, and the pen falls from my fingers …

  * * *

  Egayhazy is a closed city; hunched, hiding, tight. Its streets are narrow, its buildings lean towards each other; their gables so festooned with starflower that it looks like perpetual festival. Nothing could be further from the truth: Egayhazy is an angry city, aggressive and cowed: sullen. I keep my Ledbekh-Teltai in my bag. But the anger is not directed at me, though from the story I heard at the Camahoo hoondahvi, my fellow humans on this world have not graced our species. It is the anger of a country under occupation. On walls and doors, the proclamations of the Duke of Yoo are plastered layer upon layer: her pennant, emblazoned with the four white hands of House Yoo, flies from public buildings, the radio station mast, tower tops, and the gallows. Her javrosts patrol streets so narrow that their graapa can barely squeeze through them. At their passage, the citizens of Egayhazy flash jagged glares, mutter altiplano oaths. And there is another sigil: an eight-petalled flower; a blue so deep it seems almost to shine. I see it stencilled hastily on walls and doors and the occupation-force posters. I see it in little badges sewn to the quilted jackets of the Egayhazians; and in tiny glass jars in low-set windows. In the market of Yent, I witnessed javrosts upturn and smash a vegetable stall that dared to offer a few posies of this blue bloom.

  * * *

  The staff at my hotel were suspicious when they saw me working up some sketches from memory of this blue flower of dissent. I explained my work and showed some photographs and asked, what was this flower? A common plant of the high altiplano; they said. It grows up under the breath of the high snow; small and tough and stubborn. It’s most remarkable feature is that it blooms when no other flower does—in the dead of the Great Night. The Midnight Glory was one name, though it had another, newer, which entered common use since the occupation: The Blue Empress.

  I knew there and then that I had found Arthur.

  * * *

  A pall of sulfurous smoke hangs permanently over the Valley of Kilns, lit with hellish tints from the glow of the kilns below. A major ceramics centre on a high, treeless plateau? How are the kilns fuelled? Volcanic vents do the firing, but they turn this long defile in the flank of Mount Tooloowera into a little hell of clay, bones, smashed porcelain, sand, slag, and throat-searing sulphur. Glehenta is the last of the Porcelain Towns, wedged into the head of the valley, where the river Iddis still carries a memory of freshness and cleanliness. The pottery houses, like upturned vases, lean towards each other like companionable women.

  And there is the house to which my questions guided me: as my informants described; not the greatest but perhaps the meanest; not the foremost but perhaps the most prominent, tucked away in an alley. From its roof flies a flag, and my breath caught: not the Four White Hands of Yoo—never that, but neither the Blue Empress. The smoggy wind tugged at the hand-and-dagger of the Hydes of Grangegorman.

  Swift action: to hesitate would be to falter and fail, to turn and walk away, back down the Valley of the Kilns and the Ten Thousand Steps. I rattle the ceramic chimes. From inside, a huff and sigh. Then a voice: worn ragged, stretched and tired, but unmistakable.

  “Come on in. I’ve been expecting you.”

  * * *

  V crepitant movebitvolutans. Wescott’s Wandering Star. A wind-mobile vine, native of the Ishtaria altiplano, that grows into a tight spherical web of vines which, in the Venerian Great Day, becomes detached from an atrophied root stock and rolls cross-country, carried on the wind. A central calx contains woody nuts that produce a pleasant rattling sound as the Wandering Star is in motion.

  Cut paper, painted, layed and gummed. Perhaps the most intricate of the Venerian paper cuts.

  THE SEER’S STORY.

  Tea?

  I have it sent up from Camahoo when the stickmen make the return trip. Proper tea. Irish breakfast. It’s very hard to get the water hot enough at this altitude, but it’s my little ritual. I should have asked you to bring some. I’ve known you were looking for me from the moment you set out from Loogaza. You think anyone can wander blithely into Glehenta?

  Tea.

  You look well. The years have been kind to you. I look like shit. Don’t deny it. I know it. I have an excuse. I’m dying, you know. The liquor of the vine—it takes as much as it gives. And this world is hard on humans. The Great Days—you never completely adjust—and the climate: if it’s not the thin air up here, it’s the moulds and fungi and spores down there. And the ultraviolet. It dries you out, withers you up. The town healer must have frozen twenty melanomas off me. No, I’m dying. Rotten inside. A leather bag of mush and bones. But you look very well, Ida. So, Patrick shot himself? Fifteen years too late, says I. He could have spared all of us … enough of that. But I’m glad you’re happy. I’m glad you have someone who cares, to treat you the way you should be treated.

  I am the Merciful One,
the Seer, the Prophet of the Blue Pearl, the Earth Man, and I am dying.

  I walked down that same street you walked down. I didn’t ride, I walked, right through the centre of town. I didn’t know what to expect. Silence. A mob. Stones. Bullets. To walk right through and out the other side without a door opening to me. I almost did. At the very last house, the door opened and an old man came out and stood in front of me so that I could not pass. “I know you.” He pointed at me “You came the night of the Javrosts.” I was certain then that I would die, and that seemed not so bad a thing to me. “You were the merciful one, the one who spared our young.” And he went into the house and brought me a porcelain cup of water and I drank it down, and here I remain. The Merciful One.

  They have decided that I am to lead them to glory, or, more likely, to death. It’s justice, I suppose. I have visions you see—pula flashbacks. It works differently on Terrenes than Thents. Oh, they’re hard-headed enough not to believe in divine inspiration or any of that rubbish. They need a figurehead—the repentant mercenary is a good role, and the odd bit of mumbo-jumbo from the inside of my addled head doesn’t go amiss.

  Is your tea all right? It’s very hard to get the water hot enough this high. Have I said that before? Ignore me—the flashbacks. Did I tell you I’m dying? But it’s good to see you; oh how long is it?

  And Richard? The children? And Grangegorman? And is Ireland … of course. What I would give for an eyeful of green, for a glimpse of summer sun, a blue sky.

  So, I have been a conman and a lover, a soldier and an addict, and now I end my time as a revolutionary. It is surprisingly easy. The Group of Seven Altiplano Peoples’ Liberation Army do the work: I release gnomic pronouncements that run like grassfire from here to Egayhazy. I did come up with the Blue Empress motif: the Midnight Glory: blooming in the dark, under the breath of the high snows. Apt. They’re not the most poetic of people, these potters. We drove the Duke of Yoo from the Valley of the Kilns and the Ishtar Plain: she is resisted everywhere, but she will not relinquish her claim on the Altiplano so lightly. You’ve been in Egayhazy—you’ve seen the forces she’s moving up here. Armies are mustering, and my agents report ’rigibles coming through the passes in the Palisades. An assault will come. The Duke has an alliance with House Shorth—some agreement to divide the altiplano up between them. We’re outnumbered. Outmanoeuvred and out-supplied, and we have no where to run. They’ll be at each other’s throats within a Great Day, but that’s a matter of damn for us. The Duke may spare the kilns—they’re the source of wealth. Matter of damn to me. I’ll not see it, one way or other. You should leave, Ida. Pula and local wars—never get sucked into them.

  Ah. Unh. Another flashback. They’re getting briefer, but more intense,

  Ida, you are in danger. Leave before night—they’ll attack in the night. I have to stay. The Merciful One, the Seer, the Prophet of the Blue Pearl, can’t abandon his people. But it was good, so good of you to come. This is a terrible place. I should never have come here. The best traps are the slowest. In you walk, through all the places and all the lives and all the years, never thinking that you are already in the trap, and then you go to turn around, and it has closed behind you. Ida, go as soon as you can … go right now. You should never have come. But … oh, how I hate the thought of dying up here on this terrible plain! To see Ireland again …

  * * *

  V volanti musco: Altiplano Air-moss. The papercut shows part of a symbiotic lighter-than-air creature of the Ishtari Altiplano. The plant part consists of curtains of extremely light hanging moss that gather water from the air and low clouds. The animal part is not reproduced.

  Shredded paper, gum.

  * * *

  He came to the door of his porcelain house, leaning heavily in a stick, a handkerchief pressed to mouth and nose against the volcanic fumes. I had tried to plead with him to leave, but whatever else he has become, he is a Hyde of Grangegorman, and stubborn as an ould donkey. There is a wish for death in him; something old and strangling and relentless with the gentlest eyes.

  “I have something for you,” I said and I gave him the box without ceremony.

  His eyebrows rose when he opened it.

  “Ah.”

  “I stole the Blue Empress.”

  “I know.”

  “I had to keep it out of Patrick’s hands. He would have broken and wasted it, like he broke and wasted everything.” Then my slow mind, so intent on saying this confession right, that I had practised on the space-crosser, and in every room and every mode of conveyance on my journey across this world, flower to flower, story to story: my middle-aged mind tripped over Arthur’s two words. “You knew?”

  “All along.”

  “You never thought that maybe Richard, maybe Father, or Mammy, or one of the staff had taken it?”

  “I had no doubt that it was you, for those very reasons you said. I chose to keep your secret, and I have.”

  “Arthur, Patrick is dead, Rathangan is mine. You can come home now.”

  “Ah, if it were so easy!”

  “I have a great forgiveness to ask from you, Arthur.”

  “No need. I did it freely. And do you know what, I don’t regret what I did. I was notorious—the Honourable Arthur Hyde, jewel thief and scoundrel. That has currency out in the worlds. It speaks reams that none of the people I used it on asked to see the jewel, or the fortune I presumably had earned from selling it. Not one. Everything I have done, I have done on reputation alone. It’s an achievement. No, I won’t go home, Ida. Don’t ask me to. Don’t raise that phantom before me. Fields of green and soft Kildare mornings. I’m valued here. The people are very kind. I’m accepted. I have virtues. I’m not the minor son of Irish gentry with no land and the arse hanging out of his pants. I am the Merciful One, the Prophet of the Blue Pearl.”

  “Arthur, I want you to have the jewel.”

  He recoiled as if I had offered him a scorpion.

  “I will not have it. I will not touch it. It’s an ill-favoured thing. Unlucky. There are no sapphires on this world. You can never touch the Blue Pearl. Take it back to the place it came from.”

  For a moment, I wondered if he was suffering from another one of his hallucinating seizures. His eyes, his voice were firm.

  “You should go, Ida. Leave me. This is my place now. People have tremendous ideas of family—loyalty and undying love and affection: tremendous expectations and ideals that drive them across worlds to confess and receive forgiveness. Families are whatever works. Thank you for coming. I’m sorry I wasn’t what you wanted me to be. I forgive you—though as I said there is nothing to forgive. There. Does that make us a family now? The Duke of Yoo is coming, Ida. Be away from here before that. Go. The town people will help you.”

  And with a wave of his handkerchief, he turned and closed his door to me.

  * * *

  I wrote that last over a bowl of altiplano mate at the stickmen’s caravanserai in Yelta, the last town in the Valley of the Kilns. I recalled every word, clearly and precisely. Then I had an idea; as clear and precise as my recall of that sad, unresolved conversation with Arthur. I turned to my valise of papers, took out my scissors and a sheet of the deepest indigo and carefully, from memory, began to cut. The stickmen watched curiously, then with wonder. The clean precision of the scissors, so fine and intricate, the difficulty and accuracy of the cut, absorbed me entirely. Doubts fell from me: why had I come to this world? Why had I ventured alone into this noisome valley? Why had Arthur’s casual accepting of what I had done, the act that shaped both his life and mine, so disappointed me? What had I expected from him? Snip went the scissors, fine curls of indigo paper fell from them on to the table. It had always been the scissors I turned to when the ways of men grew too much. It was a simple cut. I had the heart of it right away, no false starts, no new beginnings. Pure and simple. My onlookers hummed in appreciation. Then I folded the cut into my diary, gathered up my valises, and went out to the waiting spider-car. The eternal clouds
seem lower today, like a storm front rolling in. Evening is coming.

  * * *

  I write quickly, briefly.

  Those are no clouds. Those are the ’rigibles of the Duke of Yoo. The way is shut. Armies are camped across the altiplano. Thousands of soldiers and javrosts. I am trapped here. What am I to do? If I retreat to Glehenta I will meet the same fate as Arthur and the Valley people—if they even allow me to do that. They might think that I was trying to carry a warning. I might be captured as a spy. I do not want to imagine how the Duke of Yoo treats spies. I do not imagine my Terrene identity will protect me. And the sister of the Seer, the Blue Empress! Do I hide in Yelta and hope that they will pass me by? But how could I live with myself knowing that I had abandoned Arthur?

  There is no way forward, no way back, no way around.

  I am an aristocrat. A minor one, but of stock. I understand the rules of class, and breeding. The Duke is vastly more powerful than I, but we are of a class. I can speak with her; gentry to gentry. We can communicate as equals.

  I must persuade her to call off the attack.

  Impossible! A middle-aged Irish widow, armed only with a pair of scissors. What can she do; kill an army with gum and tissue? The death of a thousand papercuts?