The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Reveling in the feel of satin against skin, I turned over in bed, to find myself staring at the patterned silver hilt of a knife, still vibrating from its impact, that had somehow come to be imbedded in the bedpost next to my head. The motif was one of eyes and lighting bolts. The last knife I had seen like that was now at the bottom of the Schekaagau River. I wrenched the knife from the bedpost and ran to the window, but my second attacker had already slid down the drainpipe and vanished, leaving me with a souvenir of my night at the Emperor Kristiaan.

  * * *

  “Mutated E. coli,” Salvator Martine said. He had pulled me away from the other guests at his party to give me this information.

  I swirled the Tokay in my glass and watched it sheet down the sides. “E. coli?” Only Martine would serve a wine as sweet as Tokay before dinner.

  Martine grinned, bright teeth in a face of tanned leather. He was annoyingly handsome, and smelled sharply of myrrh and patchouli. The Lords loved him, for no good reason that I could see. Several had even come to attend his party. “Normal intestinal flora. Mutated and hybridized with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Infects via the GI tract and destroys the central nervous systems of higher primates. Neat. Grew it in the guts of an Australopithecine on the African veldt, two, three million years ago. Not easy, Jacob, not easy. When I woke up on that pallet at Centrum, I had bedsores, and a headache that lasted a month. Killed them all. Every last one of the buggers. Nothing left on this planet with more brains than an orangutan.” He downed his glass of Tokay as if it were water. I took another slow sip of my own.

  We stood on the parapet of what he called his “palace.” Behind us I could hear the sound of the party, voices and clinking glasses, background music, occasionally a laugh. The sun set behind rolling green hills. From a distant ridge came the cry of a deer. A trail of mist descended on the valley, glowing in the evening light. Except for the ones behind us in the party, there were no other humans on the planet.

  “Infectious lateral sclerosis…” I murmured to myself. This was art?

  Martine laughed. “Not to worry. With no hosts, it died out, and there are no other vectors. I was careful about that.”

  He’d misunderstood my moodiness, of course, but it took a particularly impervious cast of mind to be a molder of worlds. Martine had succeeded in wiping out all of humanity, collateral branches to boot. By some standards, that made him a god. A god with bedsores. That left me with a blank canvas to look at, but nothing to review, which was perhaps his intention. If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, that’s one thing, but when the acorn is worm devoured and the tree never exists, what sound does it make then?

  “You are looking at Berenson’s new world next?”

  “Yes. She’s been very mysterious about it, but I suspect—”

  A voice interrupted us.

  “There you are. The most notable men at the party, and the two of you stand out here watching the sunset. Where’s your sense of social responsibility?” We both turned. Amanda, my wife, closed the door behind her, passing through in the roar of voices. She wore a dress that fell in waves of green and blue silk, and she emerged from it like Aphrodite from the foam, her blond hair braided and coiled around her head. A moonstone glowed in its silver setting as it rested on her forehead.

  “We were waiting for you,” Martine said with that charming insincerity that Amanda seemed to like.

  She came up and took a sip of my drink. She smiled at Martine. “I’ll have you know, Salvator, that Jacob detests sweet drinks before dinner.” She took another, and kept the glass. “I’ve been wandering around your palace. It’s wonderful! How did you ever create anything like it?”

  I felt a surge of annoyance. The palace was a monstrosity. It had towers, with pennants snapping in the breeze. It had triumphal staircases. It had flying buttresses. It had colonnades. What it didn’t have was structure. It looked like an immense warehouse of architectural spare parts.

  “It was built by some people from a world I did a few years back. Remember it, Jacob? The Berbers of the Empire of the Maghreb ruled Northern Africa. They flooded the desert and built great palaces. I had planned that.” He turned to Amanda. “As I recall, Jacob didn’t like it much.”

  He recalled correctly. I couldn’t remember much about that particular work, just hot sun and blinding water, but I did remember that I hadn’t liked it. The Lords had bid it up, though, and it was now in someone’s collection, making Martine wealthy. Critics should never socialize with artists; it’s difficult enough to like their work in the first place.

  Amanda came up and pushed herself against me. Her perfume smelled of violets, and I lost track of what I was thinking. I put my arm around her, and she pulled away, as she always did once she had my attention, and walked to the other side of the parapet to enjoy the sunset.

  Amanda had once been close to me, but was now distant, and I couldn’t remember when that had changed. It could have happened overnight, since Amanda often went to bed loving and woke up cold. Something she saw in her dreams, I’d always thought. But now it was that way most of the time, and I felt I’d let something slip by, as if we’d had an immense knock-down drag-out fight that I had not been able to attend. On the infrequent occasions when we made love it was like two people sawing a tree trunk, the length of the saw between us and only the rhythm of the task keeping us together. This still left me wanting to do it much more often than she did.

  Voices shouted for Martine inside, so the three of us went in through the French doors. The banqueting hall was an immense room, thirty feet high, and banners from the Shadows Martine had created hung down from the beams supporting the ceiling. Someone pressed a glass of wine into my hand, not Tokay, mercifully, but some dry red. The party poured after Martine as he strode through the hall, out the double doors at the other end, and down the immense stairway. At the bottom rested a cube wrapped in black velvet, about six feet high. It had been delivered through the hallways by servants available to the Lords. Despite myself, I was impressed. They did not usually permit ordinary men to move objects from Shadow to Shadow.

  “Let’s carry her up,” Martine said, and the party surged forward with cheers. It took a half dozen people to lift it. “Take my place, Jacob,” Martine said, and I found myself with a shoulder under one corner of the cube. We angled it back and, cursing and laughing, hauled it up the stairs. It was heavy and tried to slide back. I started to sweat.

  A space was cleared on the floor among the armchairs and the tables covered with half-finished drinks. The cube was put down. I looked for Amanda in the crowd but couldn’t find her anywhere. I remembered what she was wearing, and her moonstone, but wasn’t sure that I knew what she looked like anymore. It seemed that as she had grown more distant her face had stopped being familiar.

  “This is from a world I did recently. It’s not worth visiting, believe me, but it did produce one thing that’s worthwhile. I asked the Lords for permission to bring it back for my collection.” He pulled on a cord and the black velvet fell to the floor. The crowd grew silent and drew back, but no one took his eyes away.

  The most beautiful woman in the world was in hell, but she had been turned to stone and no one could do anything about it. She stared at us from behind five inches of leaded glass with pleading in her eyes. She was a Madonna, and a newborn child lay in her lap. His eyes stared blankly upward, for He had been born hideously blind.

  I had more information than Martine thought I did, from my sources at Centrum. I knew that Martine had caused eight entire worlds to be destroyed by nuclear war before he got the effect he wanted. On the last try, a group of artists, vomiting, losing their hair, seeing the constant glimmer of optic nerves degenerating in the radiation flux, had found a boulder in a blast crater and set it on a hilltop. The rock was dense with exotic isotopes, and had killed the sculptors as they chiseled it. They had worked as one, and it was impossible to tell where one artist had left off and the next began. They had created a masterpi
ece, probably not even knowing why, but Martine claimed this work as his own. Radioactive fantasies had been fashionable among the Lords lately.

  I turned and walked away, rubbing my shoulder. The party was getting loud again, despite the pleading eyes of the Virgin Mary, and I felt a little sick. I walked down a long hallway lined with loot from Martine’s various creations. I stopped in front of one painting, of Christ being carried drunk from the Marriage of Cana by the Apostles. It looked like a rather mucky Titian, all droopy flesh and blue mist, but Amanda had pointed it out specifically to me earlier in the day. She never really seemed to care much about art herself, but she somehow always knew precisely what I would like. Or would not.

  “Mr. Landstatter. Good evening.” Sitting in the shadows on straight-backed chairs, like Egyptian deities, were two Lords, Jurum and Altina, who seemed to be married, although it was hard for me to tell. At any rate, they were always together.

  “Good evening.” I bowed, but did not speak further.

  “We’ve just been looking at Martine’s little collection,” Altina said, her voice a gentle hiss. “Symbols and parts, it seems to us. Reflections of worlds in objects, and so an imitation of our strings of Shadow. What say you?” They awaited my judgment.

  Lords are strange beings. They collect worlds the way children collect brightly colored stones and seashells, but require others both to create those worlds and to determine whether they are worth having. They had gained control of the infinite universe of Shadows before anyone could remember, raised Centrum, and seemed intent on continuing in this position forever. Had one of them decided to kill me? The fact that two attempts had already failed suggested that a critic of murder would have had to give their efforts a bad review.

  “The objects have significance in themselves, and not just as signs to Shadow,” I said. The Lords often had trouble understanding ordinary art. “This statue of Apollo, for instance…” They stood and listened, Altina resting slightly on Jurum’s arm, as I took them through Martine’s collection, which ranged from the brilliant to the mediocre, and seemed to have been forgotten here, like junk in an attic. They thanked me, finally, and walked off to bed, discussing what I had said. I realized that the party above had grown silent, and that it was time for bed.

  When I returned to the banqueting hall, it was empty, save for the tormented Virgin. I stopped to look at her, but her expression had become reproachful, as if I were somehow responsible for her fate. I turned away and went to our room.

  The bed was still made, and Amanda was nowhere to be seen. I took my clothes off, threw them on the floor, and climbed in under the covers. Our room was in one of those dramatic towers, and there was nothing but darkness outside the windows. I fell asleep.

  Amanda woke me up as she slipped into bed, some time later. I started to say something, to ask where she had been.

  “Shh,” she said. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.” She hunched up on the other side of the bed, the way she did so often, even though the bed was not particularly large and this meant that she dangled precariously over the edge. I moved closer to her and nuzzled her neck. “Please, Jacob. It’s late and I want to sleep. See you in the morning.” She yawned and was quickly asleep, or at least pretended to be.

  I lay back on the other side of the bed, my heart pounding. I knew that no matter what I did, I would be unable to sleep. When I had left her, she had smelled of violets. Her neck now had the bitter aroma of myrrh and patchouli.

  * * *

  The Capuchin did his calculations with a light pen on what looked like a pane of glass, causing equations to appear in glowing green. Interpolated quotations from the Old Testament emerged in yellow, while those from the New Testament were light blue. Unavoidable references to Muslim physicists flashed a gory, infidel red. I gazed out from under my cowl, impressed but unenlightened. I don’t know anything about nuclear physics, and even when I thought I had managed to pick up the thread of an argument, I was immediately thrown off by a gloss on Thomas Aquinas or Origen. I contented myself with smelling the incense and watching the glitter of the LEDs on the rosaries of the other monks as they checked the Capuchin’s calculations.

  He turned from the glass and faced his audience. He raised his arms in supplication to heaven, then clapped his hands together. The equations disappeared, to be replaced by a mosaic of Christos Pancrator, His brow clouded by stormy judgment, lightning ready to be unleashed from His imperial hands.

  “Brothers!” the monk said. “All is in readiness. For the first time in history, the fires of Hell shall be unleashed on Earth, chained at the command of the sacred Mathematics that God, in His Wisdom, has given us to smite the infidel. We will now examine this flame, and if it is not found wanting, its hunger will soon consume the arrogant cities of all those who would oppose the Will of God!” We rose to our feet and followed him up the stairs to the surface.

  It was dry and bright outside, and the sky was a featureless blue. We segregated ourselves by Order, the gray of Dominicans to the right, the brown of Franciscans to the left, and the martial, oriental splendor of the Templars and Hospitallers in the center. There were last-minute checks of the dosimeters, and several of the more cautious had already flipped their goggles down and were sucking on their respirators.

  In front of us, across the cracked, dried mud, amid the rubble of what had once been the city of Venice, stood the Campanile of St. Mark’s, looking the same as it did in a Canaletto painting, except for the fact that the gray ovoid of the atomic bomb rested on a frame on top of the steeply pitched roof. Nearby, the crumbled dome of the cathedral lay on the ground like an overturned bowl. At a distance stood the crazily leaning Rialto bridge. All around, the flats of the dry lagoon stretched away. A trumpet call rang through the air. We repaired to our trenches, all now monastic grasshoppers with our goggles and breathing tubes. We knelt, facing the tower, and the bomb.

  When the blast came, it looked, in my goggles, like a bright, glowing dot that faded quickly to red, and then darkness. The blast shoved at the shielded robe, and I felt the heat on my face. The sound of the blast thundered in my earplugs. A moment went by. I pulled up my goggles.

  The ruins of Venice had been replaced by a smoking crater. The mushroom cloud towered overhead like a cowled monk of a different Order.

  In sudden, unplanned fervor, the monks began to pull themselves out of the safety of the trench and march towards the crater. I, of course, was with them, though I felt like a fool.

  A resonant bass voice started the tune, and the rest of us joined in:

  Dies irae, dies illa

  Solvet saecllum in favilla

  Teste David cum Sybilla …

  The Latin held a wealth of allusion lost in the English:

  Day of wrath! Day of mourning!

  See fulfilled the prophets’ warning

  Heaven and Earth in ashes burning!

  We knelt by that smoking scar and prayed until night fell.

  * * *

  My limbic Key brought me back to the hallways of Centrum vomiting and almost unconscious. Someone found me and hauled me out, a long way, since it was a distant Shadow. I had no idea who it had been, though somehow I doubted that it had been a Lord.

  The Medical Ward was high up and had large windows that let the sunlight in, unusual in the rest of the Centrum. It was a bright day outside, and I could see the endlessly repetitive walls and blocks of black rock that made up the home of the Lords of Time, stretching out to the horizon. There were no gardens in the pattern, no sculptures, and few windows. Centrum stretched over a large part of the continent some still called North America. I thought the Medical Ward abutted on the Rockies, but I was not sure, though I had already been here twice. My head pulsed and I felt disoriented.

  The ward was filled with the real effects of Shadow. A theoretical anthropologist, his arms and legs replaced by assemblages of ebony, cedar, and ivory by a race of mechanically inclined torturers, lay spread-eagled on his bed, asleep. Each twit
ch in his shoulder or hip sent dozens of precisely balanced joints flipping, so that he danced there like a windup toy. In the corner lay a fat man who had been participating in a stag hunt through the forests of Calvados, in some world that still had a Duke of Normandy, when a cornered aurochs had knocked over his horse and given him a compound fracture of the femur. He’d lain in some canopied bed, surrounded by porcelain and Shiraz carpets, dying of tetanus, while the colorful but medically ignorant inhabitants of that Shadow crossed themselves and prepared a grave in the local churchyard. When the timing signal in his Key finally came, he’d pulled himself out of bed and through the Gate to the hallway, just as I had. The man in the bed next to mine, who gasped hoarsely every few minutes, had gotten drunk, wandered into the wrong part of town, and been beaten by some gang. This was familiar to me too. It could have been any town, the Emperor of Zimbabwe’s summer capital on Lake Nyanza, or Manhattan, minor trading city in the Barony of New York, or Schekaagau. It didn’t really matter. He moaned again.

  “Ah, ‘The Suffering Critic.’ A work to gladden the heart of any artist.” Standing at the foot of my bed, with a bouquet of multicolored daisies, was a dark, bearded man with a slight twist of amusement to his mouth. That quirk was there so often that it had permanently distorted the muscles of his face, so that he always wore the same facial expression, like a mask. Masks don’t reveal, they conceal, something it was easy to forget.

  Amanda had caused to be sent to me an even dozen long stemmed red roses, which loomed over me where I lay. He read the card, which just said “Get Well” and nothing else, and, with the impatient gesture of a god eliminating an improperly conceived species of flatworm, he pulled them out of the vase and threw them away. He shoved his own daisies in their place. This done, he sat down in the chair next to me with a grunt of satisfaction. “Jacob, old friend. You look like hell, and your hair is falling out.”

  “You’re too kind, Samos.”