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

by Gardner Dozois

  His fanhearts kept tabs on his progress, and they sent ahead scouts to check on the body lying above the surf — one after another returning with the breathless news that nothing had changed since the last glimpse.

  Now and again, he let himself believe there was a human visitor. But even if that were the case, what was likely? Peaceful conversation was doubtful. And even if the two of them could talk politely, what were the odds that he could actually trust this intruder?

  By and large, human beings were monsters.

  From the forest edge, he announced his presence — a bright screaming shout familiar to every local Not — and then he donned an appropriate mask and stepped into the open, dropping the pack to throw it over the barricade, and then with a smooth motion, jumping after it.

  The pillars and the black tidal flats lay exposed. Standing on high ground, he peered through a telescope, seeing enough to make his slender hopes collapse. The pillars were masses of corundum, pale brown and tough after spending their youth being tortured far beneath some ancient crust. He remembered clearly when those landmarks were still part of this island, and not just at low tide. He studied the terrain between him and them. Then he looked at the sea beyond, dark and exceptionally rough, the wind building waves that tore loose bundles of wiry black baleen weed. The weed had been flung across the top of the pillars, and even at this distance, he could see which tangle had confused his friends. A body-shaped lump lay in the open, one leg extended and another crumpled up in a decidedly unnatural pose. And what looked like a single bony arm rose up into the rain, stumps instead of fingers and no second arm to be seen. The mistake was natural. The fanhearts had too much respect for humans to approach without being invited, which was why they circled high overhead, the entire flock screaming happily as he let the pack drop and strode across the soggy mud, and with hands and bare feet climbed his way up onto the natural table.

  The body didn’t move for him.

  He approached, knelt. And then for a full ten breaths, he saw nothing but a mangled, unfamiliar species of baleen weed. Because human flesh could never be this color or texture, and because a human body, mangled even to this degree, would still actively fight to cure its various ills.

  Then the woman’s mouth opened, exhaling once.

  He fell back on his butt.

  And she inhaled, slowly and with little effect, before her mouth pulled shut, her battered face turning back into the rough black weed.

  For another ten breaths, the man could do nothing but sit, measuring the wounds but not bothering to imagine their history. He had seen worse, yes. Many times. But there came a point where the victim couldn’t be helped. Not by the likes of him, no. True death might be exceptionally rare, but between the Eternal and the maimed lay countless states of near-extinction.

  “Do you hear me?” he asked.

  The mouth stirred, slowly pulling open. But only to manage another breath, supplying fire to what had to be a very thin metabolism.

  The right arm was missing. Her belly was ripped through. Her left leg had been shattered by a hard impact, and the poor woman’s flesh had been chewed and sucked dry, and then scorched by stomach acids. But worse than any wounds was her general health. Gingerly, he picked up the shattered leg and looked into the torn rancid meat. Human bone didn’t break so easily. Not unless it was malnourished, and severely malnourished at that. And the remaining muscle felt soft and simple, squirming between his thumb and finger — a washed-out, iron-depleted tissue perpetually on its last gasp.

  Two choices presented themselves.

  Cautious by nature, he looked at both possibilities before making his decision. He retrieved his pack and quickly yanked out what he needed, and with small rocks as anchors, he pitched a shelter over his guest and his supplies, keeping the rain off both of them and allowing him the privacy to remove his mask.

  The tide was coming back in now. He scanned the shoreline, wondering how many Nots were hiding in the woods.

  “Stand guard,” he told his friends.

  The fanhearts scattered, granting him a small measure of quiet.

  He had many blades and quality foods, but what counted here was simple. Inside an important satchel was a medical kit. Inside the kit were vials, each labeled in codes known only to him. By guesswork more than experience, he added a little powder from each vial, mixing them into a bladder half filled with pure water. The concoction that he was mixing was worth an incalculable fortune. He put the ingredients together for the first time in ages, and then with a diamond dagger, he sliced deeply into the woman’s chest and set the bladder against the new, unnoticed wound, counting the drips as they came, stopping with every fifty-five.

  His patient did not move and her breathing didn’t quicken, and for that matter, her breathing didn’t slow any either.

  But after two hundred and twenty measured drops, something changed. It was the stump of her missing arm that moved first. Which he expected. It twirled once and shivered for a few moments, and then the entire body passed into what looked like misery. He slipped the dagger back into her chest and held his hand against the hilt, waiting for the beat of a heart and measuring its sluggish force, counting the times it beat and pulling out the dagger again and added another portion of the metallic soup.

  How long had his guest gone hungry?

  And what kinds of brutal adventures had she endured?

  Because he was very much out of practice, he spoke to her. She would hear few if any of his words, and the odds of her understanding his meanings were minimal. But making noise to a captive audience was easy, and more than he would have guessed, it was fun.

  “Did a leviathan gulp you down, daughter? And did you make the poor bastard pay for his foolishness?”

  Spasms shook her.

  With three bare fingers, he reached into the gaping hole in her belly, measuring the ruined tissue, wondering which course was best.

  Food, he decided.

  He fed himself, pulling provisions from his stores and paying only minimal attention to what kind of food. Some dried finfair and glow-in-day meat and the sugary lackadaisical fruit, followed by a lump of cold wax from a grief nest.

  As he chewed on the wax, one sunken eye opened.

  He pulled the wax from his mouth and passed the lump over the doublepits of her chewed-off nose, and a random breath must have found the scent because her mouth opened, revealing starved little teeth, sickly yellow and widely spaced on a pair of pale, almost ghostly gums.

  He stuffed the wax back into his mouth, chewed hard and swallowed.

  And then he waited, counting the minutes.

  Then he found the largest bowl in his pack and sat beside the woman, legs apart and the bowl between his knees. Vomiting was a difficult trick, but he had eaten too much and that helped his stomach agree to this purge. He threw up every morsel as well as the rich juices of his digestive tract, and then with a spoon and his free hand, he guided the feast into her gaping mouth.

  The meal lasted all day and most of the night.

  Sometimes he spoke to her, explaining the logic of everything. She was short of essential metals, which kept her constantly weak. Her body needed energy, but it had no working stomach. So he let his stomach do the hard labors, breaking bonds and reconfiguring the alien proteins, creating a stew that could be absorbed and transformed into fresh muscle and better bone.

  He told her that she had somehow landed on his island. He didn’t approve of luck, but he used that old word now, congratulating whatever conspiracy of forces had managed to place her here, and now she was safe and dry under his tent, and for the present moment, she didn’t need to worry about anything.

  He mentioned that he was very, very old.

  Later, speaking in a whisper, he confessed that he was lonely and preferred his life to be that way. Other ways of living always turned out badly, and to prove that sorry fact, he told her a few stories that reached back across the ages. They were his stories, mostly. But he hadn’t repeat
ed them in a very long time, which made him wonder if they could be somebody else’s tales, stolen by a sloppy old brain. Then he realized that he was feeling both wildly fortunate and exceptionally sad. And with that, the bowl of food and bile was drained and he was hungry enough to feed himself, sharing nothing with his unexpected guest.

  That was in darkest part of the night.

  The fanhearts were sleeping in their rookery, which was their right. And a new winter storm was building, winds tearing at the tent and the fierce rain drumming and his own voice lost when he told his patient his name.

  It had been ages since he said the simple word, “Mercer.”

  If she heard him, nothing showed. She was shaking as if cold, but her half-dead body was hot as coals, and the stub-arm was as long now as a healthy hand, and the shattered leg had pulled close to her hip, bones meeting and gathering the necessary resources before attempting any new growth. Her skin was a bright red, almost glowing in the dark. And then her heat fell away, and the color left, and she suddenly lay still.

  He pulled a fungus from its sack and blew on it, causing the flesh to glow brightly enough to illuminate the entire tent.

  Carefully, he set a hand between his patient’s breasts, measuring the beat and strength of the rebuilt heart. But she didn’t stir, even when he groped her. Even when he cried hard and wiped his eyes with both hands. And then he lay beside her and took her new hand with both of his and closed his eyes and remembered back to the last time when he had slept this way, with another.

  4

  The first trace of day pushed its way through a gray-gold skin — the cured hide of an exceptionally large tattler, she realized. New eyes gazed straight up, investing their first moments in the careful study of a rope made from cured gut as well as the delicate, beautifully interwoven veins preserved within the taut fabric. Then she closed her eyes and examined her mind, astonished to discover that not only were her thoughts coming quickly and easily, but that every idea was relaxed if not happy. This was someone else’s mind at work. Compulsive, enduring fear had been the spine of her life, but that had been stolen away, and she missed it. How she could survive until dusk without the cherished terror? Yet despite the stakes, she coolly and dispassionately wondered what force had done this damage to her, and how could she move through the world if she didn’t believe that every step taken and every step avoided carried the possibility of tragedy and death?

  Again she opened her eyes. But this time she ignored what she saw, paying strict attention to how the world felt through her new skin. She was naked. With her left hand, she touched the bare flank of her leg, newborn flesh still without hair and free of punctures and the muscle beneath as hard as it had been in a long while, if ever. Then her new right hand flexed, discovering fresh bones cradled inside a strong grip. Here was a third hand. Whose? She momentarily imagined that she must have recovered her stolen limb. Her rested, recharged mind took that single impossibility and wove an elaborate tale of revenge and victory. But then that third hand flinched, and she noticed the heat of a body close beside her, and very carefully, she turned her head to one side, discovering the dim profile of a man lying on the rock floor of the small shelter.

  Suddenly her old friend, Fear, returned from its hiding place.

  She choked off a gasp and killed the urge to leap up. She didn’t know this face, and she had no idea how she had arrived here, in these thoroughly bizarre circumstances. She could imagine any scenario, and none would be right, and she might as well believe that this was her genuine life and this man was her mate and every misery and little success that she recalled was nothing but a dream.

  The next wild moments were spent studying the man’s nose and closed eyes and the occasional twitch of his wide, relaxed mouth.

  His breaths were long and patient and exceptionally shallow.

  Beneath the shelter — presumably his tent — the air smelled of exhaled air and body oils and subtle pheromones for which no name existed. A big, halfemptied pack lay just above her head. The slit doorway lay at her feet. Even for a human, the man beside her was large, longer than her by a good middle and thick about the middle in a fashion that she had never seen in their species. Dressed for cold weather, he wore full-length trousers and a loose shirt made from some kind of blackish Not fabric. His long feet and very large hands were bare. The rust-colored hair was shaggy and dense, woven into an elaborate rope that vanished between his back and the stone ground. His beard was thick and closely cropped. Like a corpse, he seemed unnaturally comfortable. Just once, he took a deep breath, and she lifted her head high enough to look down on his face, watching the wet balls of his eyes bounce beneath their brown lids, dreaming who-knew-what kind of dream while he slept unaware.

  Silently, she reached across her body with her old left hand, one finger and the tip of the thumb gently touching both sleeping eyes.

  He woke instantly, totally.

  What charmed her, then and forever, was that he acted as confused as she felt, if only for a moment or two. Who was this woman? How did he come here? Perhaps they were equal in this fashion — two souls thrown beneath the same tent, lost together and joined together out of simple shared ignorance.

  Who was thinking these thoughts?

  Because the ideas couldn’t be hers, she decided. In her busy brief life, the woman had never felt her mind slipping so quickly between subjects and possibilities.

  The man spoke to her quietly, and he seemed to smile.

  It took a moment to realize that she understood his words, despite the twisting accent and the unfamiliar voice. What he said was, “Hello,” followed by, “How do you feel?”

  She had never felt this way, so how could she answer him?

  Then he said, “Mercer.”

  She opened her newly rebuilt mouth — the strong tongue pushing against fresh hard teeth — and with a voice that she recognized only to a point, she asked, “What did you say?”

  “My name is. Mercer.”

  She repeated the word softly.

  “And yours?”

  She said, “Dream.”

  It was a little joke, reflexive and swift. She was telling him that she didn’t believe any of this. But he seemed to accept her answer, lifting his head and turning his entire body. A second tattler skin, folded three times, served as their shared mattress. It squeaked under his bulk. He squeezed her newborn hand and then let it drop, reaching for her bare body and then stopping himself abruptly, pulling back the hand before repeating her new name.

  “Dream,” he said, with feeling.

  Perhaps he didn’t believe her, but he seemed gracious. She hadn’t known many men, but even her thin experiences gave her reason to believe that this creature would either agree to almost any answer she decided to give, or he would believe nothing she said.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “Do you know the Lake-of-Lakes?”

  A dim memory tugged. “Yes,” she said.

  “This is an island . . . the sunken backbone of an old mountain range stuck far out from the northwestern shore.”

  “An island?”

  “My island.”

  She absorbed that odd news. “Who do you live with?”

  Several responses seemed to have occurred to him. But instead of answering, he asked his own reasonable questions. “Where are you from? What family is yours? And how did you find your way across the water, in the winter, without any boat?”

  An enormous story filled her head, but she told only what she remembered from her last conscious days. She ended with the giant eyes floating beneath her and a vast toothy mouth reaching for her helpless body.

  “I think that river was the Ticklewater,” he offered.

  She had never heard that name before.

  “What did your Nots look like?”

  The farmers were narrower than most of their species, she recalled, and their flesh was a ruddy purple, and they seemed to have a fondness for cindercane and sapphire arrowheads. Then
he asked about their tools and the construction of their homes, and she discovered of details waiting to be told, fueling what sounded like an expert opinion.

  “They come from the Northern Clad,” he reported. “Outcasts and now settlers, probably. Probably from one of the weak sect-families claiming some of those marginal lands.”

  She had always known that the Nots had relationships and a kind of culture, but the concept of “clad” meant little to her. And even though she had heard the term “sect-family,” its subtle implications lay beyond her reach and her interests.

  Genuinely baffled, she asked, “How do you know this?”

  The man reacted with a shy smile.

  Then he sat up, and with quick precise motions, he stuffed tools and vials into a variety of skin satchels that in turn had to be shoved inside the pack. She caught a glimpse of a rifle butt, but she couldn’t be sure if a working weapon was attached to it. Two small pistols rode his belt, secured inside their holsters by cord and complicated knots. Between the pistols was a simple mask carved from nightwood, orange flourishes painted around the eye and mouth holes. He secured the mask to his face and then looked back at her, his gray eyes burning inside the orange slashes. “Stay here,” he instructed. Then he climbed through the slit opening and pulled the pack out of sight.

  She considered following after him, or maybe slipping out the back end of the tent and running away. But her impression was that Mercer was standing nearby, giving her this important opportunity to disobey him.

  Twenty breaths later, he returned, dropping folded clothes at her feet, along with a second black and orange mask. A voice both happy and hurried told her to dress herself. He said that the mask was essential, and she shouldn’t ask for explanations yet. And when she didn’t quite hurry, he announced, “I want to go home now.”

  The clothes were his extras, far too large for her new body.

  He stood back, watching as she dressed. Then with a quiet, almost sweet tone, he added, “I’ll take you home with me and feed you, Dream. If you’d allow me that kindness.”