Year's Best SF 17

by David G. Hartwell

  His face is there, centred on the picture. He’s looking out at the viewer, looking beyond the cockpit.

  What can he see? The dead children in the square, sheltered by the bodies of their dead parents? We don’t know. But that doesn’t matter, because there is a clue in the picture. A clue to the truth. One that I saw all the time, but never noticed. It’s written across the sergeant’s face. Literally.

  A reflection in green from the light of the monitor screen, a tracery of roads and buildings, all picked out in pale green letters. Look closely at his cheek and you can just make out the words St Mark’s Church. All those names that were supposedly wiped for good by the DoS attack, and yet there they were, still resident in the Sergeant’s computer. And none of us found that odd at the time. We could have fed that country’s data back to it all along, but we chose not to.

  They say a picture paints a thousand words.

  For once, those words will be mostly speaking the truth.

  The Master of the Aviary

  BRUCE STERLING

  Bruce Sterling (www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/) lives usually in some exotic place in Europe, from which he continues his lifelong habit of cultural observation and commentary, now mostly online. In 2003 he became Professor of Internet studies and science fiction at the European Graduate School, where he teaches intensive Summer seminars. His most recent novel, his eleventh, is SF, The Caryatids (2009). His short fiction is collected in Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (2007). Throughout Sterling’s career, part of his project has been to put us in touch with the larger world in which we live, giving us glimpses of not only speculative and fantastic realities, but also the bedrock of politics in human behavior. He says, “Once I got my head around this idea that ’the future’ was bogus, I was able to mess around with a lot of invisible assumptions.” He is drawn to events and especially people tipping the present over into the future. His short fiction, now as likely to be fantasy as SF, is one of the finest bodies of work in the genre over the last three decades.

  “The Master of the Aviary” is our second story choice from Welcome to the Greenhouse, a Gene Wolfean story of the far future that takes place after environmental catastrophe. It involves political intrigues and a scholar who thinks he’s done with that sort of thing. We think it has a fine last line.

  Every Sunday, Mellow Julian went to the city market to search for birds. Commonly a crowd of his adoring students made his modest outing into a public spectacle.

  The timeless questions of youth tortured the cultured young men of the town. “What is a gentleman’s proper relationship to his civic duty, and how can he weasel out of it?” Or: “Who is more miserable, the young man whose girl has died, or the young man whose girl will never love him?”

  Although Julian had been rude to men in power, he was never rude to his students. He saw each of these young men as something like a book: a hazardous, long-term, difficult project that might never find a proper ending. Julian understood their bumbling need to intrude on his private life. A philosopher didn’t have one.

  On this particular market Sunday, Julian was being much pestered by Bili, a pale, delicate, round-headed eccentric whose wealthy father owned a glass smelter. The bolder academy students were repelled by Bili’s mannerisms, so they hadn’t come along. Mellow Julian tolerated Bili’s youthful awkwardness. Julian had once been youthful and awkward himself.

  Under their maze of parasols, cranes, aqueducts, and archery towers, the finer merchants of Selder sold their fabrics, scissors, fine glass baubles, medications, oils, and herbal liquors. The stony city square held a further maze of humble little shacks, the temporary stalls of the barkers. The barkers were howling about vegetables.

  “Asparagus! Red lettuce! Celery! Baby bok choy!” Each shouted name had the tang of romance. Selder’s greenhouses close-packed the slope of the mountain like so many shining warts. It was for these rare and precious vegetables that foreigners braved the windy mountain passes and the burning plains.

  Mellow Julian bought watercress and spinach, because their bright-green spiritual vibrations clarified his liver.

  “Maestro, why do you always buy the cheapest, ugliest food in this city?” Bili piped up. “Spinach is awful.”

  “It’s all that I know how to cook,” Julian quipped.

  “Maestro, why don’t you marry? Then your wife could cook.”

  “That’s a rather intrusive question,” Julian pointed out. “Nevertheless, I will enlighten you. I don’t care to indulge in any marriage ritual. I will never indulge in any bureaucratic ritual in this city, ever again.”

  “Why don’t you just hire a cook?” persisted Bili.

  “I’d have to give him all his orders! I might as well simply cook for myself.”

  “I know that I’m not very bright,” said Bili humbly. “But a profound thinker like you, a man of such exemplary virtue … Everybody knows you’re the finest scribe in our city. Which is to say, the whole world! Yet you live alone in that little house, fussing with your diet and putting on plays in your backyard.”

  “I know people talk about me,” shrugged Julian. “People chatter and cackle like chickens.”

  Bili said nothing for a while. He knew he had revealed a sore spot.

  Mellow Julian examined the sprawling straw mat of a foreign vendor. All the women of Selder adored seashells, because seashells were delicate, pretty, and exotic. Mellow Julian shared that interest, so he had a close look at the wares.

  The shell vendor was a scarred, bristle-bearded sea pirate. His so-called rare seashells were painted plaster fakes.

  Julian put away his magnifying lens. He nodded shortly and retreated. “Since you were born almost yesterday, Bili,” he said, glancing over his shoulder, “I would urge you to have a good look at that wild, hard-bitten character. This marketplace has never lacked for crooks, but this brute may be a spy.”

  Bili pointed. “There’s even worse to be seen there, maestro.”

  Huddled under a torn cotton tarp were five dirty refugees: black-haired, yellow-skinned people in travel-torn rags. One of the refugees was not starving. He was the owner or boss of the other four, who visibly were.

  “They shouldn’t let wretches like those through the gates,” said Bili. “My father says they carry disease.”

  “Every mortal being carries some disease,” Julian allowed. He edged nearer to the unwholesome scene. The exhausted refugees couldn’t even glance up from the cobblestones. “Well,” said Julian, “no need to flee these wild invaders. My guess would be that somebody invaded them.”

  “They’re some ‘curious specimens,’ as you always put it, maestro.”

  “Indeed, they most certainly are.”

  “They must have come from very far away.”

  “You are staring at them, Bili, but you are not observing them,” said Julian. “This man is in the ruins of a uniform, and he has a military bearing. This younger brute must be his son. This boy and girl are a brother and sister. And this older woman, whom he has dragged along from the wreck of their fortunes … Look at her hands. Those hands still have the marks of rings.”

  The ruined soldier rose in his tattered boots and stuck out his callused mitt. “Money, water, food, house! Shelter! Fish! Vegetable!”

  “I understand you,” Julian told him, in a fluent Old Proper English. “I’m touched that you’ve taken the trouble to learn so many nouns. So. What is your name, sir? My friends call me Mellow Julian Nebraska.”

  “You give me money for her,” the soldier demanded, pointing. “You take her away, I buy shelter, water, food, fish, vegetable!”

  “I have some money,” offered Bili.

  “Don’t get hasty, Bili.”

  “But I think I understand what this foreigner is saying!” said Bili. “Listen! I want to try out my Old Proper English on him. I buy this woman. You take my money. You eat your fish and vegetables.” Bili pointed at the boy and girl. “You feed these children. You wash your clothes. You co
mb your hair.” He glanced at Julian. “That’s the right English word, isn’t it? Comb?”

  “It is,” Julian allowed.

  “You wash yourself in the public bath,” Bili persisted. “You stink lesser!” He turned to Julian triumphantly. “Just look at him! Look at his eyes! He really does understand me! My lessons in the Academy of Selder … That dead language is practical! I can’t wait to tell my dad!”

  “You should no longer call this city ‘Selder,’ Bili. The true name of your city is ‘Shelter.’ ‘The Resilient, Survivable, Sustainable Shelter,’ to list all her antique titles. If your ancestors could see you speaking like this—in their own streets, in their own language—they’d say you were a civilized man.”

  “Thank you, maestro,” said Bili, with a blush to his pale, beardless cheeks. “From you, that means everything.”

  “We must never forget that we descend from a great people. They made their mistakes—we all do—but someday, we’ll surpass them.”

  “I’m going to buy this woman,” Bili decided. “I can afford her. The Selder Academy doesn’t cost all that much.”

  “You can’t just buy some woman here in the public street!” said Julian. “Not sight unseen, for heaven’s sake!”

  Julian untied the mouth of his scholar’s bag and rustled through the dense jumble within it—his watercress, spinach, scarf, pipe, scissors, string, keys, wax tablet, and magnifying glass. He pulled out one ancient silver dime.

  Julian crouched beside the cowering woman and placed the time-worn coin into her blistered hand. “Here,” he said, “this coin is for you. Now, stay still, for I’m going to examine you. I won’t hurt you. Stick out your tongue.”

  She gripped the coin feverishly, but she understood not one word.

  “Stick out your tongue,” commanded Julian, suiting action to words.

  He examined her teeth with the magnifying glass.

  Then he plucked back the slanted folds of her eyelids. He touched both her ears—pierced, but no jewels left there, not anymore. He thumped at her chest until she coughed. He smelled her breath. He closely examined her hands and feet.

  “She’s well over forty years old,” he said. “She’s lost three teeth, she’s starving, and she’s been walking barefoot for a month. These two youngsters are not her children. I dare say a woman of her years had children once, but these are not them. This brute here with the leather belt, which he used on her legs … He’s not her husband. She was a lady once. A civilized woman. Before whatever happened, happened.”

  “How much should I pay for her?” said Bili.

  “I have no idea. This is no regular auction. The Godfather is a decent man, he prohibited all that slave-auction mischief years ago. You’d better ask your father how much he thinks a house-servant like her is worth. Not very much, I’d be guessing.”

  “I’m not buying her for my house,” said Bili. “I’m buying her for your house.”

  A moment passed.

  “Bili—,” Julian said severely, “have I taught you nothing with my lectures, or from the example of my life? I devote myself to sustainable simplicity! Our ancestors never had slaves! Or rather, yes they did, strictly speaking—but they rid themselves of that vice, and built machines instead. We all know how that ugly habit turned out! Why would I burden myself with her?”

  Bili smiled sheepishly. “Because she is so much like a pet bird?”

  “She is rather like a bird,” Julian admitted. “More like a bird than a woman. Because she is starving, poor thing.”

  “Maestro, please accept this woman into your house. Please. People talk about you all the time, they gossip about you. You don’t mind that, because you are a philosopher. But maestro, they talk about me! They gossip about me, because I follow you everywhere, and I adore you! I’d rather kneel at your feet than drill with the men-at-arms! Can’t you do me this one favor, and accept a gift from me? You know I have no other gifts. I have no other gifts that even interest you.”

  After Mellow Julian accepted Bili’s gift, Bili became even more of the obnoxious class pet. Bili insisted on being addressed by his antique pseudonym Dandy William Idaho, and sashayed around Selder in a ludicrous antique costume he had faked up, involving “blue jeans.” Bili asked impertinent, look-at-me questions during the lectures. He hammed it up after class in amateur theatricals.

  However, Bili also applied himself to his language studies. Bili had suddenly come to understand that Old Proper English was the language of the world. Old Proper English was the language of laws, rituals, boundary treaties, water rights, finance arrangements, and marriage dowries. The language of civilization.

  That was why a wise and caring Godfather took good care to see that his secretaries wrote an elegant and refined Old Proper English. A scribe with such abilities could risk some personal eccentricities.

  Julian named his new servant House Sparrow Oregon. Enquiries around the court made it clear that she was likely from Oregon. War and plague—they were commonly the same event—had expelled many of her kind from their distant homeland.

  Deprived of food and shelter, they had dwindled quickly in the cruelties of the weather.

  Sometimes, when spared by the storms, refugees found the old grassy highways, and traveled incredible distances. Vagrants came from the West Coast, and savages from the East Coast. Pirates came from the North Coast, where there had once been nothing but ice. The South was a vast baking desert that nobody dared to explore.

  Once a teenage boy named Juli had left a village in Nebraska. Julian had suffered the frightening, dangerous trip to Selder, because the people in Selder still knew about the old things. And they did know them—some of them. They knew that the world was round, and that it went around the sun. They knew that the universe was thirteen thousand, seven hundreds of millions of years old. They knew that men were descended from apes, although apes were probably mythical.

  They had also built the only city in the known world that was not patched-up from the scraps of a fallen city. Created at the sunset of a more enlightened age, Selder was a thousand years old. Yet it was the only city that had grown during the long dark ages.

  The court of the Godfather was a place of sustainable order. The council-of-forty, the Men in Red, were its educated, literate officials. They held the authority to record facts of state. They knew what was meet and proper to write, and what was of advantage to teach, and what should be censored. They had taught Julian, and he had worked for them. He had come to know everything about what they did with language. He was no longer overly fond of what they did.

  House Sparrow Oregon had no language that Julian understood. To test her, Julian inscribed the classic letters of antiquity into his wax tablet: THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG. PACK MY BOX WITH FIVE DOZEN LIQUOR JUGS.

  In response, Sparrow timidly made a few little scrapes with the stylus. Crooked little symbols, with tops and bottoms. They were very odd, but she knew only ten of them. Sparrow was nobody’s scholar.

  Julian was patient. Every child who ever entered a school was a small barbarian. To beat them, to shout at them, to point out their obvious shortcomings … what did that ever avail? What new students needed were clear and simple rules.

  This aging, frightened, wounded woman was heartsick. She had lost all roles, all rules, and all meaning. She was terrified of almost everything in Selder, including him.

  So: it was about a small demonstration, and then a patient silence: the wait for her response. So that Sparrow’s dark eyes lost their cast of horror and bewilderment. So that she observed the world, no longer mutely gazing on it.

  So: This is the water. Here, drink it from this cup. It’s good, isn’t it? Yes, fresh water is good! The good life is all about simple things like clear water.

  Now, this is our bucket in which we bring the water home. Come with me, to observe this. There is nothing to fear in this street. Yes, come along. They respect me, they will not harm you.

  You see this? Every str
anger living in Selder must learn this right away. This is our most basic civic duty, performed by every able-bodied adult, from the Godfather himself to the girl of twelve. These waterworks look complex and frightening, but you can see how I do this myself. This is a water-lever. It holds that great leather bucket at one end, and this stone weight here at our end.

  We dip the great bucket so as to lift the dirty water, so that it slowly flows in many locks and channels, high back up the hillside. We recycle all the water of this city. We never spill it, or lose its rich, fertile, and rather malodorous nutrients. We can spill our own blood in full measure here, but we will never break our water cycle. This is why we have sustained ourselves.

  After we heave this great bucket of the dirty civic water—and not before!—then we are allowed to tap one small bucket of clean water, over here, for our private selves.

  Now you can try.

  Don’t let those stupid housewives hurt your feelings. We all look comical at first, before we learn. Yes, you are a foreigner, and you are a curious specimen. That is all right. In the House of Mellow Julian Nebraska, we embrace curiosity. Our door is always open to those who make honest inquiries. We house many things that are strange, as well as you.

  Now for the important moral lesson of the birds. Yes, I own many birds. I own too many. Some are oddly shaped, and special, and inbred, and rather sickly. Quite often they die for mysterious reasons. I cannot help that: It is my fate to be the master of an aviary.

  Yes, the name I gave you is Sparrow, just like that smallest bird hopping there. These are my pigeons, these are my chickens, these are my ducks. In antiquity there were many other birds, but these are the surviving species.

  One can see that to care for these birds suits your proclivities. When you chirp at them in your native language, they hear you and respond to you. As Sparrow the bird-keeper, you have found new purpose in the world. We will have one small drink to celebrate that. It’s pretty good, isn’t it? It isn’t pure clean water, but a moderate amount of sophistication has its place in life.