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

by Gardner Dozois

  She would. Yes. For the moment, why not?

  * * *

  Mercer dismantled and packed both tattler skins. Then they climbed down from a stack of brown corundum boulders, hurrying across a stretch of low ground that just a hundred breaths ago had been underwater. The man had no trouble carrying the enormous pack. With him in the lead, they fled the wet shoreline, crossing onto a wide apron where last summer’s scrubtar gave way to winter weeds. Fanhearts were flying nearby, their screams rather different from how the mainland varieties would sound. For two breaths, the man paused to look off to the east, studying what seemed to be nothing but a tiny tangle of woods. Then he continued west, leading her toward an enormous half-built wall — corundum and slate and mudstone bricks stacked high enough to slow them, with upright poles giving the barrier the illusion of height.

  On the other side of the wall, the world changed. Suddenly they were pushing hard into a dark wet realm that didn’t seem to know either fire or the axe. They paused just long enough to remove and stow their masks. Then they began to walk with quick long strides. At first she assumed somebody had been hiding in those little woods that he had stared at. Unseen enemies were chasing them, their arrival imminent and worth avoiding at all cost. Why else move with such a quick, half-blind gait, hanging to the obvious trails? Why so thoroughly ignore the ground underfoot and the black canopy created by the tallest trees that she had ever seen? An army of Nots could be hiding inside these shadows; yet the man seemed to look at nothing but the ground ten or twenty steps ahead of them, holding what had to be a punishing pace. He acted oblivious to the world. Which made him a fool. She came to that uncharitable conclusion, and it would take days for that wrong impression to vanish, at least to where she wouldn’t feel pity every time that she looked into his ageless, almost unreadable face.

  On bare feet, they climbed through the ancient woods, reaching the crest of the hill exactly where it was easiest to cross. Judging by the noise, every corner of this wilderness was full of life. Croaking voices and singing voices and voices carried on wings constantly jabbered away, and sometimes the man would make his own little sounds, as if pretending to be a dewlane beast or some kind of buzz. She couldn’t make sense of what he was saying, much less why it was worth the effort. Her savior might as well have been trading thoughts with the rain, as much good as it would do. But she didn’t offer questions or betray any doubt with her newly reconstituted face. And perhaps Mercer was worried by the silence, because he paused suddenly on a wide, hard-worn portion of the trail. “Can I trust you to be good?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she lied, almost convincing herself of her honesty.

  And perhaps he believed the weak promise. Though the half-grin hinted that no, even this peculiar fool had his limits.

  Guarding that old trail were mounds and heaps that looked unlike anything she had ever seen before. She smelled death leaking from them, and between the gray leaves of widow fungi, she saw the glossy white remains of recent bodies. Animal carcasses had been dropped here to rot. No, she realized, these weren’t animal carcasses. She noticed a single dead Not laid on the pile, its narrow three-toed feet near the ground and its badly decomposed face staring up at nothing, the soft proteinaceous skull still emerging from the purple flesh, its complicated jaws pulled apart to reveal the spine of what had been its own sexual member, jutting from the back of its mouth.

  She stopped, staring at that oddity.

  “He was one of mine,” said Mercer.

  Her response was to glance at him and then stare again at the pile, trying to count the bodies that had built this impressive feature.

  “He was a good citizen,” the man added.

  “One of yours?”

  Something in the moment was grimly satisfying. But he didn’t offer explanations, preferring instead to ask, “What else do you notice?”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere.”

  She saw everything worth noticing, while this crazed man was oblivious to the most essential details.

  “This trail,” he prompted.

  She hated to walk on foot-worn ground. No reasonable soul strolled down common avenues.

  “Guess,” he prompted. “How many feet created this trail?”

  And when she didn’t respond, he said, “Two feet. One pair. And how long would you imagine it took that man to cut the ground this way?”

  She watched him pull one long foot back across the yellowish corundum.

  “I don’t have a guess,” she confessed quietly.

  “Of course you don’t. Only one living person knows how to measure that much time.”

  “You know?”

  He nearly laughed. But even then, he stubbornly refused to give explanations. Again he walked, even faster than before now, and she followed the path willingly, but with every step she tried to decide where she would jump if trouble came, and where to flee, and if he didn’t survive this day, how much of that swollen, burdensome pack could she carry on her own.

  His home was buried inside a stubborn old hill. The front door was red and massive — a slab of native ruby rock protected by at least one booby trap that he took the trouble to disable now. Then he slid the door open on a greased rail, revealing a series of tunnels created by the careful blasting of faults and natural cavities. With tangible pride, he mentioned that he had built his home by himself and added to it whenever he had the chance, and in the next breath he asked his guest what she thought about his humble sanctuary.

  “I can see it,” she complained.

  Her critique was ignored.

  “Every trail leads to it,” she mentioned. Then she added, “Nots live this way. In the open, easy to find.”

  Except she had never seen Nots that lived underground, much less built on such a colossal scale. And the idea that one man would need so much space, just for his body, was difficult to accept.

  “Why did you do all this work?”

  “You can’t offer any guesses?”

  She shook her head.

  Most of the rooms were empty of furnishings or decorations, connected to one another but never by simple, obvious routes. The windowless places were lit by pampered stands of cool shadow-fighting fungi. Doorways and hallways and hidden dark chambers would probably cause a Not to become lost, and even an invading human might grow disoriented. Perhaps that gave this home’s owner advantages inside here, she reasoned. But were those blessings worth all of the trouble?

  “Security isn’t my first purpose,” he confessed.

  He wanted her to beg for explanations. But instead she asked, “How long did it take you? To pile up all these rooms?”

  His smile was broad and warm.

  “On average,” he replied, “I add one fresh chamber every ten years.”

  They had been walking through his maze for a long while, and not once had they crossed their path.

  “How many rooms in all?”

  “Would one thousand rooms impress you?”

  It was an enormous, useless number — the kind of swollen figure that had never come into play during her narrow existence.

  “I’m not impressed,” she lied.

  Then her mind dropped back to an earlier question. “How long have you walked your trail? To wear at the stone that way . . . how many years have you wasted marching the same few directions . . . ?”

  They had entered a spacious room nestled deep inside the hill. Blue fires burned inside thick globes of glass, washing away every shadow. Electric currents flowed inside a variety of odd, seemingly magical machines. Unlike the air outside, this volume felt dry and pleasantly warm, little winds finding their way in and then out again. On every surface, she could smell the man. The furnishings looked used and treasured. Rock walls were softened with polished and oiled slabs of wood. Yet even in the middle of this castlelike arrangement of carved rock, she could hear the squawks and trillings coming from the surrounding forest.

  “We’ll live here and in these next two rooms,”
Mercer announced.

  At last, he let his gigantic pack crash to the floor.

  “My kitchen is fully stocked,” he promised. “Whatever is to your taste is yours. Rest hard, and then I’ll explain whatever you can understand.”

  “What can I understand?”

  “That might take us time to puzzle out,” he mentioned. Then he opened the pack and pulled out a short-barreled rifle — an ancient design, but with the carved butt that she had seen before and a grip coated with black plastic, the long magazine probably filled with explosive rounds.

  She couldn’t help but stare at the treasure.

  “You still have wounds to heal,” he warned. “It’s going to take a lot of patience for your body to forget its old life.”

  “Are you leaving?”

  “For the rest of the day, maybe longer.” He gestured with the rifle’s barrel, adding, “My bathroom is the final room. When you need to relieve yourself, go in the water-chair in the corner. Don’t just shit on my floor.”

  Even in simple matters, nothing here made sense.

  The man stepped into the hallway and then looked back at his guest, delivering two warnings. “If you wander anywhere, even for a short distance, I’ll know. And eventually I will learn everything that you have done.”

  She didn’t believe him. But she nodded, promising, “I’ll stay here.”

  “And rest.”

  “Yes.”

  Then with a delicate menace, he added, “Humans like you have found their way to my island. And some of them, sometimes for a very long while, were my welcome guests.”

  Inside those words lay emotion, ageless and raw, and she knew enough to pay close attention.

  “Where are those guests now?” she asked.

  “Back to the mainland, I assume.”

  Then he snorted and laughed softly, and turning his back to her, he added, “Unless they’ve ended up where everybody ends up. Which is a place I don’t know much about, and you don’t know much about, and neither of us wants to learn the truth about it any time soon.”

  5

  She wasn’t an ignorant soul, regardless what her host might believe. She understood that the world swam away from the sun each year, the weakening light helping to trigger the cold and wet that was winter. And better than some, she appreciated how the transformation of life helped bring about each new season. In the blistering brilliance of summer, every lake and quiet river was covered with blackish blankets of knotted algae and bladder-weed. Those floating jungles absorbed sunlight and its invisible mate, heat, and like a lid on a pot, the living skin trapped the rising vapors. Clouds soon vanished. Rain all but ceased. Forests sipped at their stockpiles of water, but by summer’s end, the trees often burned. Yet the world always swam away from the sun again. The pall of smoke and fading daylight reached a trigger point, and that’s when fish ate up the algae faster than it could grow, and that signaled the bladderweed to make its seed and then shrivel away. Now the world’s water lay exposed to the desiccated air. Clouds blossomed in a single afternoon. The world suddenly grew cooler and darker. And then the winter storms began, racing across the land, drowning fires and slaking countless thirsts.

  Her mother was an orphan and life-long wanderer, and she had taught her only surviving child everything worth knowing about their world. Imagine a round skull sporting two faces, she had explained. The face beneath their feet was covered with old mountains and mud flats, enormous shallow lakes and endless rivers. But the sibling’s face carried less land, and every dry surface was rough and young, dotted with sharp peaks that needed no excuse to spit fire at the sky. Both skies shared the same stars and moons. But the other face stared up at a vast and exceptionally strange world. Being naturally proud, the Creator had saved its most startling colors for its largest child — distinct bands of earwish purple and human blood that were always in motion, endlessly swirling around bone-white clouds and bottomless holes that were bluer than even the youngest cindercane. Her mother had never seen that giant world with her own eyes, but she confidently described how their little home danced around it, and when the sun slid behind the giant’s bulk, the best human eye could make out the flickering fires of storms — great silent lightning bolts powerful enough to incinerate all the world’s Nots and all the humans too.

  Their world was a moon, much the same as the two moons visible on clear summer nights. And her mother tried to explain to her daughter how the rock beneath their toes suffered as a consequence. Each swirling journey around the giant world made the sister moons jealous, and they worked together to crush and twist the old stone. They wanted to murder this world, but by tugging at its heart, their hatred made the heart beat. That was why there were quakes and geysers as well as the legendary fire-mountains. Though how moons could hate moons was a mystery, and more than once the young girl had been warned not to waste her head on questions that could not be answered.

  One day Mercer asked what she believed about the sky, and then he listened carefully to her explanations for the seasons and the purpose of the gas world and the consequences of their sister moons’ greed. He never made comments, not even with those expressive pale eyes of his. Then when she was finished, at last, he said, “All right,” and leaned closer. “And what about everything else?”

  “What else is there?”

  “Beyond the moons,” he said. “Please, Dream. Tell me what you think about the sky.”

  With a clear, certain voice — very much her mother’s voice — she repeated the lessons of her childhood. The stars were suns like theirs, but most were childless. And between the stars lay nothing but black sand and the exhalations of the dead. With assurance, she told how any clear night revealed a vast, sterile realm. There wasn’t any purpose in naming those distant lights. Except to find marks for navigation, watching the sky was a sorry waste.

  Mercer seemed to expect those words. He shook his head and laughed weakly, and then he spoke to the floor, asking, “Where did this sad, useless model of the universe come from?”

  “From my mother’s mouth,” she snapped. “And what do you mean? Why shouldn’t I ignore what I don’t need to know?”

  He accepted her rebuff, smiling at nothing for a breath or two. Then with a soft coaxing voice, he mentioned, “We were discussing the weather. Every human has his or her favorite season. And yours, I’m guessing, is summer.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I like winter, and we are rather different souls, it seems.”

  Lucky or wise, he was correct: She was born in the middle of a wildfire. Since then she had always loved the fierce, honest glare of each day. Given her choice, she preferred slinking through baked forests and oppressive glades, every piece of vegetation swollen with stored rainwater and fire-resistant saps. It was easier to spot danger when all life suffered equally. Even though the sun was a swollen monster and every tree was ready to explode into fire and ash, the living world always managed to survive, and wasn’t that the greatest blessing? And of course the summer nights were bright, and by dawn they were tolerably cool, and a solitary human could enjoy good nights and the occasional great night as she made her way across the endless, enduring world.

  But the sun always grew small again, weakening before it vanished behind the endless storms, and those cool gray times brought new threats and many more teeth.

  “Fire,” Mercer repeated, without reason.

  She paused.

  Then he spoke again, offering a single word that meant nothing to her.

  “What was that?”

  Again, he said, “Oxygen.”

  She waited for an explanation.

  “This atmosphere is thick with the element,” he mentioned. Then he winked, adding, “Which is only reasonable. There isn’t enough iron lying about to cause any meaningful amount of rust. Not to mention all the ways this vegetation tears apart water and carbon dioxide, making odd sugars and churning out the oxidizers as a byproduct.”

  She studied his hairy chin, h
is bright gray eyes. The way his hands made a pair of cups, and the erect posture with which he filled a chair constructed from smooth rope and gray driftwood.

  “Did your mother ever tell you?” he began.

  Then he paused.

  “What?” she finally asked. “Did she tell me what?”

  “Where we came from,” he said with a slow, serious tone. “The human species, I mean.”

  She knew three stories, each as unreliable as its siblings. Every explanation brought their species down from the sky. The Gold Moon was her favorite, if only because when the night was deep and that moon was full, she found herself wasting time staring up at its beautiful smooth face.

  Either moon was their first homeland, she explained. Or they had climbed up from the world of gas and lightning. How her ancestors left any one of those places, and why they should come to this barely livable world, were unanswered, unanswerable mysteries. But she doubted the reasons were as simple as the old fables claimed — a trick played on the naïve humans by some malicious, unnamable god.

  Mercer laughed gently, nodding as if he agreed.

  “You have a different story to tell me. Don’t you?”

  “But not today,” he remarked. “We’re talking about the seasons now.”

  Except that she had nothing else to offer.

  Mercer’s smile changed. It was a subtle difference, but she recognized what lay behind those glad eyes and the healthy white teeth. He was smiling as men have always smiled at women, probably since the Creation. Staring hard at her eyes, pretending that his words had little importance, he whispered, “Winter is a good time for humans to conceive.”

  “Early winter is best,” she added. “The baby arrives early in the second summer, when everything grows but nothing burns yet.”

  That lucky date had been passed, she was telling him.

  Mercer nodded, pretending to accept her wisdom. But the smile remained. Leaning forward in his chair, the ropes creaked as his voice rose slightly, remarking, “I don’t think you’ve been healthy nearly long enough. Not to conceive, much less carry the child successfully. Winter or summer, you’re far too depleted to be fertile.”