The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  She was generous in return. She granted all citizens of Deseret conditional status as adopted Americans, and she promised that Quetzalcoatl’s armies would stick to the roads through the northwest Texas panhandle, where the grasslands of the newest New Lands project were still so fragile that an army could destroy five years of labor just by marching through. Carpenter printed out two copies of the agreement in English and Spanish, and Sam and Virgem America signed both.

  Only then, when their official work was done, did the old woman look up into Sam’s eyes and smile. “Are you still a heretic, Sam?”

  “No,” he said. “I grew up. Are you still a virgin?”

  She giggled, and even though it was an old lady’s broken voice, he remembered the laughter he had heard so often in the village of Agualinda, and his heart ached for the boy he was then, and the girl she was. He remembered thinking then that forty-two was old.

  “Yes, I’m still a virgin,” she said. “God gave me my child. God sent me an angel, to put the child in my womb. I thought you would have heard the story by now.”

  “I heard it,” he said.

  She leaned closer to him, her voice a whisper. “Do you dream, these days?”

  “Many dreams. But the only ones that come true are the ones I dream in daylight.”

  “Ah,” she sighed. “My sleep is also silent.”

  She seemed distant, sad, distracted. Sam also; then, as if by conscious decision, he brightened, smiled, spoke cheerfully. “I have grandchildren now.”

  “And a wife you love,” she said, reflecting his brightening mood. “I have grandchildren, too.” Then she became wistful again. “But no husband. Just memories of an angel.”

  “Will I see Quetzalcoatl?”

  “No,” she said, very quickly. A decision she had long since made and would not reconsider. “It would not be good for you to meet face to face, or stand side by side. Quetzalcoatl also asks that in the next election, you refuse to be a candidate.”

  “Have I displeased him?” asked Sam.

  “He asks this at my advice,” she said. “It is better, now that his face will be seen in this land, that your face stay behind closed doors.”

  Sam nodded. “Tell me,” he said. “Does he look like the angel?”

  “He is as beautiful,” she said. “But not as pure.”

  They embraced each other and wept. Only for a moment. Then her men lifted her back into her litter, and Sam returned with Carpenter to the helicopter. They never met again.

  * * *

  In retirement, I came to visit Sam, full of questions lingering from his meeting with Virgem America. “You knew each other,” I insisted. “You had met before.” He told me all this story then.

  That was thirty years ago. She is dead now, he is dead, and I am old, my fingers slapping these keys with all the grace of wooden blocks. But I write this sitting in the shade of a tree on the brow of a hill, looking out across woodlands and orchards, fields and rivers and roads, where once the land was rock and grit and sagebrush. This is what America wanted, what it bent our lives to accomplish. Even if we took twisted roads and got lost or injured on the way, even if we came limping to this place, it is a good place, it is worth the journey, it is the promised, the promising land.

  MICHAEL BISHOP

  For Thus Do I Remember Carthage

  Michael Bishop is one of the most acclaimed and respected members of that highly talented generation of writers who entered SF in the 1970s. His short fiction has appeared in almost all the major magazines and anthologies, and has been gathered in three collections: Blooded on Arachne, One Winter in Eden, and the recent Close Encounters with the Deity. In 1983, he won the Nebula Award for his novel No Enemy but Time. His other novels include Transfigurations, Stolen Faces, Ancient of Days, Catacomb Years, and Eyes of Fire. His most recent novel is The Secret Ascension. Upcoming is a new novel, Unicorn Mountain. Bishop and his family live in Pine Mountain, Georgia.

  FOR THUS DO I REMEMBER CARTHAGE

  Michael Bishop

  1

  Augustine wants no company, and the last person whom he expects to intrude is a troublesome astronomer from Far Cathay.

  A fever has besieged the old man. In the bishop’s house next to the basilica of Hippo Regius, he mulls the imminence of his own death and the portentous events of this past year.

  An army of 20,000 Vandals has besieged Hippo. Under their wily king Genseric, they seem inevitable occupiers. Boniface, Count of Africa, has held them at bay throughout the summer with a force of Gothic mercenaries and a few ragtag volunteers from among the male population of upper Numidia—but Genseric’s fleet has blockaded the harbor and Vandal soldiers have disabled the power plant providing Hippo with electricity. Augustine must read the psalms copied out and affixed to his bedchamber walls by the flicker of an olive-oil lamp rather than by the steady incandescence of one of Seneca the Illuminator’s clever glass globes.

  “This earthly city cannot last,” the bishop tells himself, “but the City of God … the City of God endures.”

  Possidius appears inside the door of his bedchamber with a tray of pears, bread, and marinated chick-peas.

  Bishop of Calama, a town twenty leagues to the south, Possidius fled to Hippo last October to escape the oncoming barbarians. (Two Numidian bishops less wise than he were tortured to death outside the walls of their cities.) He has lived in Augustine’s episcopal quarters ten months now, but has been fussily nursing the brilliant old man for only these past two weeks.

  “Go away, Possidius,” murmurs Augustine.

  “A modest convivium. Excellency, you must eat.”

  “Sometimes, Christ forgive me, it’s hard to remember why.”

  “To maintain your strength, sir. And, this evening, you have a visitor.”

  “But I’ve forbidden visitors. Especially physicians.”

  “This isn’t a physician. Vindicianus has almost lost patience with you, Excellency.”

  The old man in the loose black birrus says, “Whoever it is, is sadly unwelcome. Not for his shortcomings, but for mine.”

  Tears streak Augustine’s face. He has been reading the Davidic psalm beginning “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven,” and the balm of its verse “Thou shalt preserve me from trouble” has surely induced these tears. Frequently, of late, he weeps, and Possidius cannot tell if he does so from pity for the plight of Roman Africa, or from an unspeakable gratitude to God, or from some ancient shame for which only he of all men would scruple to indict himself. Undoubtedly, he weeps for many reasons, but the bishop of Calama is unable to sort them out.

  “He’s a stargazer, Excellency, who hails—he declares—from the capital of Africa.” Possidius places the food tray on Augustine’s writing desk.

  “Carthage?”

  “So he says. But he’s spent the past thirty years looking at the stars from various high escarpments in Northern Wei.”

  “Ah, yes. Flying machines and dragons aren’t the only miracles from that mythic land, are they?”

  “Telescopes, Excellency. Horseless chariots. Boxes that talk, and others in which pictures dance like living people. Seneca the Illuminator says they’ve perfected machines in Cathay a century in advance of any made by the Daedaluses of Rome or Constantinople.

  “But the greatest miracle, Excellency, may be that your visitor has returned to Numidia exactly when Genseric’s Vandals have come bearing down on us from Gibraltar and Mauretania. The astronomer sneaked through their siege lines to enter the city. Morally, sir, I think you should grant him the interview he desires.”

  “Morally,” the old man mutters. On his feet for the first time since Possidius came in, he totters to his desk, picks up a pear, burnishes it on his robe. He lifts it to his face, sniffing it for submerged memories. He has lived three quarters of a century, and a year besides, and that Possidius should be defining morality for him—fabled Defender of the Faith against the errors of Manichees, Donatists, and Pelagians—stings. But God kno
ws that he sometimes needs chastening, and perhaps Possidius is God’s flail.

  “Does my would-be visitor have a name?”

  “Iatanbaal, sir.”

  “Christ save us. A pagan name. Does this man have any Latin, Possidius, or am I to talk to him in my execrable Neo-Punic?”

  Possidius smiles. “Latin is Iatanbaal’s first language. But for three decades he has spoken in the tongues of Babel.”

  “‘Given of God,’” Augustine muses.

  “Excellency?”

  “In Neo-Punic, latanbaal means ‘given of God.’” He places the pear back on his desk and lapses into reverie.

  “Father Augustine,” Possidius prompts.

  The old apostle stirs. “Oh, yes. Our visitor. Iatanbaal. ‘Given of God.’ In that case, let him come in.”

  2

  It startles Augustine to find that Iatanbaal—why did he expect a younger man?—is hard on sixty. The astronomer, who drops to his knees to kiss the bishop’s hand, is as gray as he is.

  The stargazer wears a tight tunic in decadent late-Roman style, but a pair of leggings—trousers—favored by Hsiung-nu horsemen in the service of the Wei Cathayans among whom he has lived since the turn of the fifth Christian century. Over one shoulder Iatanbaal carries a long leathern bag, and on his left wrist he wears a thin strap bearing on it an oblong jewel, very like obsidian.

  This jewel is featureless, but when the astronomer stands, it strikes the edge of Augustine’s desk. Suddenly, a row of crimson characters ignites atop the black stone. However, the gleam dies quickly, and Augustine crosses his hands on his breast to stare at the enigmatic bracelet.

  “Pardon me, Excellency,” the astronomer says, and their eyes lock. “This device is a miniature time-gem.”

  The bishop realizes that he and his guest are the same height, with irises the same slaty Berber gray. In other circumstances—the besieging Vandals elsewhere, his own death a decade rather than days away—they might have been friends. Augustine lets his gaze fall again to the “time-gem.”

  Each time that Iatanbaal depresses a metal stem on the device, tiny crimson characters appear. At first they say VII:XXXVIII. A moment later: VII:XXXIX. The astronomer explains that these numerals signify the hour and the minute, and that the horological artisans of Lo-yang made him a device with Roman digits—a feeble thrust at his homesickness. He reveals that the time-gem takes its power from a coinlike disc, or energon, within the jewel.

  “Seven-forty,” says the bishop when new numerals—VII:XL—wink into view. “By what criteria do you establish the hour?”

  “In Northern Wei, Father Augustine, scientifically. But while traveling, by sun and simple intuition.”

  Augustine tacks about. “Why have you come, Master Iatanbaal?” His guest, he knows, wants to give him the time-gem, and he has no wish to accept it, either as token of esteem or as bribe. Death’s specter has carried him beyond flattery, beyond manipulation.

  “Because in your Confessions—a copy of which the former bishop of Alexandria let me see—I found you have an unusual philosophy of time, rivaling in sophistication the theories of our most learned Cathayan astronomers.” Iatanbaal refastens his time-gem’s strap. “It leads me to suspect that you alone of all Romanized westerners may be able to comprehend the startling cosmogony of the Wei genius Sung Hsichien. Comprehend and so appreciate.”

  “I wrote my Confessions a long time ago.” Augustine eyes the astronomer warily. What he had penned about time in that book was that before God made heaven and earth, neither they nor time itself had any existence. Time did not begin until God spoke the word that inaugurated creation. Before time, there was no time, and what God did then (the conjecture that He was readying Hell for pryers into mysteries being a jesting canard), no mortal mind may reckon. Is that so amazing a theory of time? Is it powerful enough to call a Carthaginian astronomer home from Cathay to praise him? Augustine can scarcely credit such a motive.

  “But, Excellency, you repeat and extend your discussion of time in the eleventh and twelfth books of The City of God. I read that masterpiece in Alexandria, too, but this time during a brief stop on my trip home from the Orient. In the eleventh book, you write—I’ve memorized the words—‘the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time,’ while in the twelfth you argue against those who hold that history is cyclic and that this world is born but to die and rise again. Sung Hsi-chien has discovered empirical proof of your positions in his astronomical observations, and this, I think, is a brave coincidence of minds.”

  “Empirical proof?” Augustine’s fever has made him woozy. He sits down at his desk. “Master Iatanbaal, what need of empirical proof has a faith predicated on reason?”

  “Why, none, I suppose, but Sung Hsi-chien and five generations of Cathayan lens-grinders, astronomers, cosmogonists, and sky-ray readers have still provided it. Since I was lucky enough to help Sung with his researches, I can outline these proofs for you.”

  “I don’t require them.”

  “No, of course you don’t. But you of all philosophers should wish to learn Sung’s ‘New Cosmogony.’”

  “Ague grips me. I’m dying, Master Iatanbaal.”

  “Here, eat.”

  The astronomer pushes Possidius’s tray toward the bishop, then hefts his long bag onto the opposite end of the desk. From it he pulls a tube of ivory and silver; an ebony box with a small glass port on its upper face; and two enameled packets, which Augustine decides are accessories to the ebony box. How he knows this, he cannot guess. But, sipping thoughtfully at his chick-pea marinade, he waits for Master Iatanbaal to explain.

  “A telescope,” the astronomer obliges, pointing to the tube. “Outside Lunghsi, in a tower on the Great Wall, the Wei Cathayans have a telescope so much larger than this one, Father Augustine, that it dwarfs the pillars of the Parthenon. An instrument even bigger dominates a hill near Lo-yang, while the grandest device of all stares skyward from a dome outside Ching-chao. Such far-seers, manned by imperial astronomers and scientists, have altered most of our old notions of the heavens.”

  Augustine dunks his bread in the piquant marinade. Telescopes larger than temple pillars? he thinks, working his bad teeth. This importunate scoundrel is lying.

  “The Wei have also invented a type of colossal telescope that gathers and focuses invisible sky-rays from distant stars. The best is beyond Ku-shih, in the Takla Makan Desert, and Sung and his helpers visit it several times a year in a pterodrac—a mechanical flying dragon—commissioned by the Emperor. I myself have flown in this pterodrac, Father Augustine.”

  A madman, the bishop thinks. Colossal telescopes and draconoid flying machines. Fantasies that he presents as Holy Writ …

  Iatanbaal lays the telescope aside and seizes on his ebony box, shifting it so that its tiny eye points directly at Augustine. “A luminotype chamber,” he says, fingering a lever on its side. “With this, one can save the image of any object or person as it exists at the instant the operator depresses this lever. The Cathayans call such images—” the word worse than Greek to Augustine—“but I say luminopicts, ‘light pictures,’ and in Northern Wei scarcely a household is without a wall of such images in the family shrine.”

  “Why do you regale me with lies?”

  Iatanbaal, heretofore the mildest of guests, bristles at this, but remains civil. “Lies? No lies, Excellency. The opposite. Your entire life has been a quest for truth, your whole career as a bishop a battle for truth against pagans and heretics. My prime motive in coming here—in traveling such distance; in risking my life to defy the Vandal blockade—was to bring you the cosmogonic truths that I learned in Cathay. To instruct you in them so that you may append them—before you die—to The City of God, the most glorious philosophy of history ever conceived.”

  “Magnum opus et arduum,” Augustine murmurs. But aloud he says, “That book is finished. I can add nothing to it.”

  “I speak of The City of God in your mind, Excellency, not of dry words on p
aper. This grander City of God, the Platonic one you revise with every breath … unless I misjudge you terribly, that book will never be finished until your soul departs your body.”

  This approach nearly disarms Augustine. But he concludes that Iatanbaal is patronizing him and says, “I fear my soul is soon to do that. Please, sir, precede it in departing. I tire.”

  “By Christ, old man, I’ve not come all these years and all this distance to have you spurn my message!”

  “Away, astronomer.”

  “God does not will it!”

  “Possidius!” Augustine cries. “Possidius, this man is—”

  “You don’t believe me? Here, look!” Iatanbaal opens one of the packets beside his luminotype chamber. He thrusts at Augustine a smooth square of parchment: an image of five robed Cathayans.

  These men are rendered monochromatically, in palpable light and shadow, their faces sharp but alien, the image of their robes as silken as the imaged garments. Augustine slides his thumb across the surface of this provocative square.

  “A luminopict,” Iatanbaal says. “The older man, at center, is Sung Hsi-chien. The rest are students—gifted disciples.”

  “A clever painting under an equally clever glaze.”

  “This isn’t a hand-drawn artifact!” Iatanbaal says. “This is a luminopictic image from life, caught on a light-sensitive substance by the rapid opening and closing of this mechanical eye!”

  “Do you destroy the box to remove the image? And must you make a second box to catch a second image?”

  Possidius enters the bedchamber. Augustine wordlessly signals his fatigue to his fellow bishop, and Possidius, a wraith in black, approaches the astronomer.

  “It’s time for you to go.”

  The violence with which Iatanbaal shrugs aside Possidius’s hand alarms Augustine. “Even the prodigal son received a warmer welcome than the one you hypocrites have tendered me!” Tears of resentment and frustration squeeze glistening from his lower lids.