The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  “Trust you to do what? I trust you to do what I’ve seen you doing,” said Onyx.

  “You have no faith!”

  “You have no sense!”

  “All I want is to learn about the Eye of the Moon and how to get there,” Jasper said.

  “I don’t care about the Eye of the Moon! I want to live in a city and look at tall buildings! And all I have to do to get there is walk toward the sunrise!”

  “I’ll walk alongside you,” said Jasper. “Honest, Onyx!”

  “Really? Then let’s walk!”

  “. . . after the Dance, of course, I mean. . . .”

  “Hah!”

  “But I owe her that much,” he said, not daring to pronounce the name of Anna Tingri Five for fear of further provoking Onyx. His big eyes pleaded wordlessly.

  “She cares nothing for you, you mule!”

  These words wounded Jasper in the tender part of his pride, and he drew back and let his vanity take command of his mouth. “Bet you’re wrong,” he said.

  “Bet how much?”

  “Ten copper dollars!”

  “It’s a bet!” cried Onyx, stalking away.

  The Harvest Festival came at summer’s decline, the cooling hinge of the season. The troupe joined a hundred others for the celebration. Onyx marvelled at the gathering.

  There were many harvests in the world but only a few Festivals. Each of the world’s great breadlands held one. Prosaically, it was the occasion on which the fireborn collected the bounty of grain and vegetables that had been amassed by their fleets of agricultural robots, while commoners feasted on the copious leavings, more than enough to feed all the mortal men and women of the world for the coming year. That was the great bargain that had sealed the peace between the commonfolk and the fireborn: food for all, and plenty of it. Only overbreeding could have spoiled the arrangement, and the fireborn attended to that matter with discreet lacings of antifertility substances in the grain the commoners ate. Commoners were born and commoners died, but their numbers never much varied. And the fireborn bore children only rarely, since each lived a dozen long lives before adjourning to the Eye of the Moon. Their numbers, too, were stable.

  But the Harvest Festival was more than that. It was an occasion of revelry and pilgrimage, a great gathering of people and robots on the vast stage of the world’s steppes and prairies, a profane and holy intermingling. The fireborn held exhibitions and contests, to be judged by the Council of the Twelve-Lived and marvelled at by commonfolk. Jugglers juggled, poets sang, artisans hawked their inscrutable arts. Prayer flags snapped gaily in the wind. And of course: skydancers danced.

  Several troupes had arrived at the site of the North American festival (where the junction of two rivers stitched a quilt of yellow land), but the troupe Onyx served was one of the best-regarded and was allotted the third day and third night of the Festival for its performances.

  By day, the lesser dancers danced. Crowds gawked and marvelled from below. Warm afternoon air called up clouds like tall white sailing ships, and the skydancers danced with them, wooed them, unwound their hidden lightnings. The sky rang with bells and drums. Sunlight rebounding from the ethereal bodies of the avatars cast rainbows over empty fields, and even the agricultural robots, serene at the beginning of their seasonal rest, seemed to gaze upward with a metallic, bovine awe.

  Onyx hid away with Dawa Nine, who was fasting and praying in preparation for his night flight. The best dancers danced at night, their immense avatars glowing from within. There was no sight more spectacular. The Council of the Twelve-Lived would be watching and judging. Onyx knew that Dawa Nine was deeply weary of life on Earth and determined to dance his way to the moon. And since the day she had discovered Jasper and Anna Tingri Five exchanging kisses, Onyx had promised to help him achieve that ambition—to do whatever it was in her power to do, even the dark and furtive things she ought to have disdained.

  She could have offered Dawa Nine her body (as Jasper had apparently given his to Anna Tingri Five), but she was intimidated by Dawa’s great age and somber manner. Instead, she had shared secrets with him. She had told him how Jasper worked Anna Tingri Five’s gear, how he had learned only a few skydancing skills but had learned them well enough to serve as Anna’s foil, how he had mastered the technical business of flight harnesses and bodymakers. He had even modified Anna Tingri Five’s somatic generator, making her avatar’s vast face nearly as subtle and expressive as her own—a trick even Dawa Nine’s trained apprentices could not quite duplicate.

  None of this information much helped Dawa Nine, however; if anything, it had deepened his gloomy conviction that Anna Tingri Five was bound to outdance him and steal his ticket to the Eye. Desperate measures were called for, and time was short. As the lesser dancers danced, Dawa Nine summoned Onyx into the shadow of his tent.

  “I want you to make sure my bodymaker is functioning correctly,” he said.

  “Of course,” said Onyx. “No need to say, Old Nine.”

  “Go into the equipment tent and inspect it. If you find any flaws, fix them.”

  Onyx nodded.

  “And if you happen to find Anna Tingri’s gear unattended—”

  “Yes?”

  “Fix that, too.”

  Onyx didn’t need to be told twice. She went to the tent where the gear was stored, as instructed. It was a dreadful thing that Dawa had asked her to do—to tamper with Anna Tingri Five’s bodymaker in order to spoil her dance. But what did Onyx care about the tribulations of the fireborn? The fireborn were nothing to her, as she was nothing to them.

  Or so she told herself. Still, she was pricked with fleabites of conscience. She hunched over Dawa Nine’s bodymaker, pretending to inspect it. Everything was in order, apart from Onyx’s thoughts.

  What had Anna Tingri Five done to deserve this cruel trick? (Apart from being fireborn and haughty and stealing kisses from Jasper!) And why punish Anna Tingri Five for Jasper’s thoughtlessness? (Because there was no way to punish Jasper himself!) And by encouraging this tampering, hadn’t Dawa Nine proven himself spiteful and dishonest? (She could hardly deny it!) And if Dawa Nine was untrustworthy, might he not blame Onyx if the deception was discovered? (He almost certainly would!)

  It was this last thought that troubled Onyx most. She supposed that she could do as Dawa had asked: tamper with the bodymaker and ruin the dance Anna Tingri Five had so carefully rehearsed—and it might be worth the pangs of conscience it would cause her—but what of the consequences? Onyx secretly planned to leave the Festival tonight and make her way east toward the cities of the Atlantic Coast. But her disappearance would only serve to incriminate her, if the tampering were discovered. The fireborn might hunt her down and put her on trial. And if she were accused of the crime, would Dawa Nine step forward to proclaim her innocence and take the responsibility himself?

  Of course he would not.

  And would Onyx be believed, if she tried to pin the blame on Dawa?

  Hardly.

  And was any of that the fault of Anna Tingri Five?

  No.

  Onyx waited until an opportunity presented itself. The few apprentices in the tent left to watch a sunset performance by a rival troupe. The few robots in the pavilion were downpowered or inattentive. The moment had come. Onyx strolled to the place where Anna Tingri Five’s bodymaker was stored. It wouldn’t take much. A whispered instruction to the machine codes. A plucked wire. A grease-smeared lens. So easy.

  She waited to see if her hands would undertake the onerous task.

  Her hands would not.

  She walked away.

  Onyx left the troupe’s encampment at sunset. She could not say she had left the Festival itself; the Festival was expansive; pilgrims and commoners had camped for miles around the pavilions of the fireborn—crowds to every horizon. But she made slow progress, following the paved road eastward. By dark, she had reached a patch of harvested land where robots like great steel beetles rolled bales of straw, their red caution-light
s winking a lonesome code. A few belated pilgrims moved past her in the opposite direction, carrying lanterns. Otherwise she was alone.

  She stopped and looked back, though she had promised herself she would not.

  The Harvest Festival smoldered on the horizon like a grassfire. A tolling of brass bells came down the cooling wind. Two skydancers rose and hovered in the clear air. Even at this distance Onyx recognized the glowing avatars of Jasper and Anna Tingri Five.

  She tried to set aside her hopes and disappointments and watch the dance as any commoner would watch it. But this wasn’t the dance as she had seen it rehearsed.

  Onyx stared, her eyes so wide they reflected the light of the dance like startled moons.

  Because the dance was different. The dance was wrong!

  The Peasant and the Fireborn Woman circled each other as usual. The Peasant should have danced his few blunt and impoverished gestures (Supplication, Lamentation, Protestation) while the Fireborn Woman slowly wove around him a luminous tapestry of Lust, Disdain, Temptation, Revulsion, Indulgence, Ecstasy, Guilt, Renunciation and eventually Redemption—all signified by posture, motion, expression, repetition, tempo, rhythm, and the esotery of her divine and human body.

  And all of this happened. The dance unfolded in the sky with grace and beauty, shedding a ghostly rainbow light across the moonless prairie. . . .

  But it was the Fireborn Woman who clumped out abject love, and it was the Clumsy Peasant who danced circles of attraction and repulsion around her!

  Onyx imagined she could hear the gasps of the crowd, even at this distance. The Council of the Twelve-Lived must be livid—but what could they do but watch as the drama played out?

  And it played out exactly as at rehearsal, except for this strange inversion. The Peasant in his tawdry smock and rope-belt pants danced as finely as Anna Tingri Five had ever danced. And the Fireborn Woman yearned for him as clumsily, abjectly, and convincingly as Jasper had ever yearned. The Peasant grudgingly, longingly, accepted the advances of the Fireborn Woman. They danced arousal and completion. Then the Peasant, sated and ashamed of his weakness, turned his back to the Fireborn Woman: they could not continue together. The Fireborn Woman wept and implored, but the Peasant was loyal to his class. With a last look backward, he descended in a stately glide to the earth. And the Fireborn Woman, tragically but inevitably spurned, tumbled away at the whim of the callous winds.

  And kept tumbling. That wasn’t right, either.

  Tumbling this way, Onyx thought.

  It was like the night so many months ago when the January sky had come down close and Anna Tingri Five had fallen out of it. Now as then, the glowing avatar stiffened. Its legs, which could span counties, locked at the knee. The wind began to turn it sidelong, and parts of the skydancer grew transparent or flew off like evanescent colored clouds. Broken and shrinking, it began to fall.

  It came all apart in the air, but there was something left behind: something small that fell more gently, swaying like an autumn leaf on its way from branch to winter. It landed nearby—in a harvested field, where copperfaced robots looked up in astonishment from their bales of straw.

  Onyx ran to see if Anna Tingri Five had been hurt. But the person wearing the bodymaker wasn’t Anna Tingri Five.

  It was Jasper, shrugging out of the harness and grinning at her like a stupid boy.

  “I doctored the bodymakers,” Jasper said. “I traded the seemings of them. From inside our harnesses everything looked normal. But the Peasant wore the Fireborn Woman’s body, and the Fireborn Woman appeared as the Peasant. I knew all about it, but Anna Tingri Five didn’t. She danced believing she was still the Fireborn Woman.”

  “You ruined the performance!” exclaimed Onyx.

  Jasper shrugged. “She told me she loved me, but she was going to drop me as soon as the Festival ended. I heard her saying so to one of her courtiers. She called me a ‘dramatic device.’ ”

  “You could have told me so!”

  “You were in no mood to listen. You’re a hopeless skeptic. You might have thought I was lying. I didn’t want you debating my loyalty. I wanted to show it to you.”

  “And you’re a silly dreamer! Did you learn anything useful from her—about the Fifth Door to the Moon?”

  “A little,” said Jasper.

  “Think you can find it?”

  He shrugged his bony shoulders. “Maybe.”

  “You still want to walk to the Atlantic Coast with me?”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  Onyx looked back at the Harvest Festival. There must be chaos in the pavilions, she thought, but the competition had to go on. And in fact, Dawa Nine rose into the air, right on schedule. But his warrior dance looked a little wobbly.

  “I crossed a few connections in Dawa Nine’s bodymaker,” she confessed. “He’s a liar and a cheat and he doesn’t deserve to win.”

  Jasper cocked his big head and gave her a respectful stare. “You’re a saboteur too!”

  “Anna Tingri Five won’t be going to the moon this year, and neither will Dawa Nine.”

  “Then we ought to start walking,” said Jasper. “They won’t let it rest, you know. They’ll come after us. They’ll send robots.”

  “Bet you a copper dollar they can’t find us,” Onyx said, shrugging her pack over her shoulder and turning to the road that wound like a black ribbon to a cloth of stars. She liked the road better now that this big-headed Buttercup County boy was beside her again.

  “No bet,” said Jasper, following.

  RUMINATIONS IN AN ALIEN TONGUE

  Vandana Singh

  Vandana Singh was born and raised in India, and currently resides in the United States with her family, where she teaches physics and writes. Her stories have appeared in several volumes of Polyphony, as well as in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, InterNova, Foundation 100, Rabid Transit Press, Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing, Mythic, Trampoline, and So Long Been Dreaming: Post-colonial Science Fiction & Fantasy. She published a children’s book in India, Younguncle Comes to Town, and a chapbook novella, Of Love and Other Monsters. Her other books include another chapbook novella, Distances, and her first collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet. Her most recent book is an original anthology, co-edited with Anil Menon, Breaking the Bow.

  Here’s an autumnal and contemplative story about a gifted mathematician exploring an enigmatic alien artifact found on another planet, one with the power to move things through space, time, and a tangled skein of alternate-possibility universes. When the things so moved are people, though, bitter complications can ensue . . .

  Birha on the Doorstep

  Sitting on the sun-warmed step at the end of her workday, she laid her hand on the dog’s neck and let her mind drift. Like a gyre-moth finding the center of its desire, her mind inevitably spiraled inward to the defining moment of her life. It must be something to do with growing old, she thought irritably, that all she did was to revisit what had happened all those years ago. Yet her irritation subsided before the memory. She could still see it with the shocking clarity of yesterday: the great, closed eyelid set in the enormous alien stronghold, opening in response to her trick. The thick air of the valley, her breath caught in her throat, the orange-and-yellow uniforms of the waiting soldiers. She had gone up the ladder, stepped through the round opening. Darkness, her footsteps echoing in the enormous space, the light she carried casting a small, bobbing pool of illumination. This was the alien stronghold considered invincible by the human conquerors, to which the last denizens of a dying race had crawled in a war she had forgotten when she was young. She had expected to find their broken, decayed bodies, but instead there was a silence like the inside of a temple up in the mountains. Silence, a faint smell of dust, and a picture forever burned into her mind: in light of her lamp, the missing soldier, thunderstruck before the great mass of machinery in the center.

  That was the moment when everything changed. For her, and eventually for humankind.
She had been young then.

  “Hah!” she said, a short, sharp sound, an old woman laughing at her foolishness. It felt good to sit here on the doorstep, although now it was turning a little cold. On this world the sun didn’t set for seven years as counted on the planet where she had been born. She knew she would not live to see another sunset; her bones told her that, and the faint smell in her urine, and her mind, which was falling backward into a void of its own making.

  But the clouds could not be ignored, nor the yellow dog at her knee, who wanted to go inside. There would be rain, and the trees would open their veined, translucent cups to the sky. There would be gyre-moths emerging from holes in the ground, flying in smooth, ever-smaller circles, at the center of which was a cup of perfumed rain—and there would be furred worms slithering up the branches to find the sweet moth-meat. In the rain under the trees, the air would quiver with blood and desire, and the human companion animals, the dogs and cats and ferrets would run to their homes lest the sleehawks or a feral arboril catch them for their next meal. Yes, rain was a time of beauty and bloodshed, here at the edge of the great cloud forest, among the ruins of the university that had been her home for most of her life.

  She got up, noting with a grim satisfaction that, in this universe, old knees creaked. She went in with the dog and shut the door and the windows against the siren-like calls of the foghorn-trees, and put some water on to boil. Rain drummed on the stone walls of her retreat, and she saw through the big window the familiar ruined curve of the university ramparts through a wall of falling water. Sometimes the sight still took her breath away. That high walk with the sheer, misty drop below was where she had first walked with Thirru.

  A Very Short Rumination

  When I was born my mother named me Birha, which means “separated” or “parted” in an ancient human language. This was because my mother was about to die.

  Difficult Loves

  Thirru was difficult and strange. He seemed eager to make Birha happy but was like a big, foolish child, unable to do so. A large, plump man, with hair that stood up on end, he liked to clap his hands loudly when he solved a difficult problem, startling everyone. His breath smelled of bitter herbs from the tea he drank all day. Even at their pairing ceremony he couldn’t stop talking and clapping his hands, which she had then thought only vaguely annoying and perhaps endearing. Later, her irritation at his strangeness, his genius, his imbecility, provoked her into doing some of her best work. It was almost as though, in the discomfort of his presence, she could be more herself.