The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  Dapple obeyed, pausing on the way to pick up a ball of soap. This water was pleasant too. Not cold, but cool, as the matriarch had suggested, and so very fresh! It must come from a mountain stream. The soap lathered well and smelled of herbs. She washed herself entirely, then rinsed. The robbers would stay in her mind, but the stink of their cave would be out of her fur. In time, her memories would grow less intense, though she didn’t want to forget the boy – and was it right to forget Manif and the other actors?

  She climbed out of the second pool. A towel hung on the clothing rack, also a comb with a long handle. She used both, then dressed. The young women in this country wore kilts and vests. Her kilt was dark blue, the fabric soft and fine. Her vest was made of thicker material, bright red with silver fasteners down the front. The Ettin had provided sandals as well, made of dark blue leather.

  “Beyond question you are a handsome young woman,” the matriarch said. “Brave and almost certainly intelligent, but far too reckless! What are we going to do with you?”

  Dapple said nothing, having no answer. The matriarch picked up her staff and rose.

  They went through more shadowy halls, coming finally to an open door. Beyond was a terrace made of stone. A low wall ran along the far side. Beyond the wall was the river that ran next to the house, then pastures rising toward wooded hills. Everything was in shadow now, except the sky and the very highest hill tops. Two men sat on the terrace wall, conversing: Ettin Taiin and Cholkwa. The robber boy stood nearby, looking far neater and cleaner than before. Like Dapple, he wore new clothes: a kilt as brown as weathered bronze, and sandals with brass studs. Looking from him to Cholkwa, she could see a resemblance. Hah! The boy would be loved by many, when he was a little older!

  “I have introduced Cholkwa to his son,” Ettin Taiin said to his mother.

  Cholkwa stood and made a gesture of greeting. His gaze met Dapple’s briefly, then passed on as if she were a stranger. “What a surprise, Hattali! When I left the cave, running as quickly as possible, I did not know the woman was likely to produce a child.”

  “You should have come to us, as soon as you escaped,” the matriarch said. “If we’d known what the robbers were doing, we would have dealt with them years ago. Do you know this young woman?”

  “She is Helwar Ahl, the daughter of a family that’s dear to me. A good young person, though Taiin tells me she has some crazy idea of becoming an actor.”

  “I told you that!” cried Dapple.

  “I told you it was impossible! My life is dangerous and disreputable, Ahl. No woman should lead it!” He glanced toward the matriarch. “My stay with the robbers occurred during my first trip south. I didn’t know your family, or much of anyone. After I escaped, I fled to the coast and took the first ship I could find going north. Hah! I was frightened and full of self-disgust! It was several years before I came south again. By then, I had convinced myself that the woman could not have been pregnant. I half-believed the story was a dream, caused by a southern fever. How could I think that such people were possible and real?”

  “I am,” said the boy. “We are.”

  “Think of the men who have died because you did not tell your story!” the matriarch said to Cholkwa. “Think of the children who have been raised by criminals! How can they possibly turn out well? What kind of person would turn away from children in such a situation?”

  Cholkwa was silent for a moment, then said, “I have no excuse for my behaviour. I did what I did.”

  “Remember that he makes his living as a comic actor,” said the Ettin captain. “How can we judge a man who spends his time portraying small animals with large sexual organs? Let’s put these long-past happenings off to the side. We have enough problems in the present.”

  “This is true,” said the matriarch. “For one thing, I need a chair.”

  “I’ll tend to that,” said Cholkwa and hurried off.

  The captain, still lounging comfortably on the wall, glanced at his mother. “Have you decided how to deal with the robbers?”

  The old woman groaned, leaning on her staff and looking morose. “You will have to kill the men, and we will have to adopt the women and children, though I do not look forward to having females like these in our houses.”

  “This is a relief! I thought, knowing your opinion of the robber women, that you might ask me to kill them.”

  “Would you do it?”

  “If you told me to, yes.”

  “And then what?”

  “Why ask, Mother? The answer is obvious. I have always wanted to be famous, not infamous. If I had to do something so dishonourable, there would be no alternative left except suicide!”

  “This is what I expected,” the matriarch said. “Listening to Helwar Ahl’s story, I asked myself, ‘What is worse? Taiin’s death, or a house full of unruly women?’ No one should have to make such a decision! But I have made it, and I will endure the consequences.”

  “Be more cheerful! If you spread the women out among many houses, they may not be much of an aggravation.”

  “We’ll see. But I’m glad to know that you are an honourable man, Taiin, though it means your old mother will suffer.”

  “Think of the pleasure you’ll be able to take in my continued survival,” the captain said. “Not every mother of your age has a living son, especially one with my excellent moral qualities.”

  What a fine pair they were, thought Dapple. She could see them in a play: the fierce soldier and his indomitable parent, full of love and admiration for each other. In a hero play, of course, the captain would die and the matriarch mourn. Hah! What a sight she would be, alone on a stage, standing over the captain’s body!

  Women came onto the terrace with chairs and lanterns. The matriarch settled herself. “Bring food!”

  “Now?” asked a middle-aged woman. “When you are with company?”

  “Bring food for them as well,” said the matriarch.

  “Mother!” said the captain.

  “I’m too old and hungry to care about that kind of propriety. Manners and morality are not the same.”

  The rest of them sat down, all looking uneasy. The women brought food. Dapple discovered she was ravenous, as was the boy, she noticed. The two men poured themselves cups of halin, but touched no food. The matriarch ate sparingly. It wasn’t as bad as Dapple had expected, since no one spoke. This wasn’t like a pack of carnivores snarling over their downed prey, or like the monsters in old stories who chattered through mouths full of people. This meal was like travellers in a tavern, eating together because they had to, but quickly and in decent silence.

  Soon enough they were done. The matriarch took a cup of halin from her son. “One problem has been solved. We will adopt the robber women. Cholkwa’s behaviour will be forgotten. My son is right! We have no ability to judge such a man, and Taiin – I know – wants to keep Cholkwa as a friend.”

  “This is true,” said the captain.

  “Only one problem remains: the girl, Helwar Ahl.”

  “No,” said the robber boy. “I also am a problem.” He glanced at Cholkwa. “I don’t want to stay here and watch these people kill my male relatives. Take me with you! I want to see foreign harbours and ships as large as caves!”

  Cholkwa frowned. For a moment, there was silence.

  Ettin Taiin refilled his cup. “This might be a good idea for two reasons. The boy is likely to suffer from divided loyalties. That’s always a problem when one adopts a child as old as he is. And I find him attractive. If he stays here and becomes Ettin, I will be troubled with incestuous thoughts. As much as possible, I try to keep my mind free of disturbing ideas. They cause sleepless nights on campaign and slow reflexes in battle.”

  “What about Helwar Ahl?” asked Cholkwa, obviously trying to go from one topic to another.

  “She can’t go with you,” the matriarch said. “A woman with an unrelated man! And we are not ocean sailors, nor are the other families in this region, the ones we trust. Take the boy, if
he’s going to give Taiin perverted ideas, and tell the girl’s family, when you get north, that she’s here with us. They can send a ship for her.”

  “I want to be an actor,” said Dapple.

  “You can’t!” said Cholkwa.

  The matriarch frowned. “There are two things that men cannot do. One is have babies, because it’s impossible. The other is harm women and children, because it’s wrong. And there are two things that women cannot do: father children and fight in a war. These are absolute prohibitions. All other kinds of behaviour may be difficult or disturbing, but they can be done. Granted, I would not want a daughter of mine to become an actor, though it might help make plays more interesting. There are too many penises in comedy, and too many honourable deaths in tragedy. These are male interests. Maybe the world would benefit from a play about real life!”

  “Surely you don’t mean that, Mother,” the Ettin captain said.

  “You’re a fine lad and my favourite child, but there is much you don’t know. The world does not consist entirely of sex and violence. It isn’t only men who take action, and there are kinds of action that do not involve violence or sex.”

  Dapple said, “I will run away again, I promise.”

  “From here?” asked the matriarch. “Surely you have learned how dangerous the south can be.”

  “From anywhere,” said Dapple.

  Ettin Hattali sipped halin. The others watched her. By this time, the sky was dark and full of stars, which shed enough light so that Dapple could see the old woman’s pale face. “Life is made of compromises,” Hattali said finally. “I will offer you one. Stay here until your family sends for you, and I will argue for you with them. You are useless for breeding already. A girl who runs off in all directions! This is not a trait any family will want to continue. I’ll say as much and argue that the world needs women who speak for women, not just in our houses and the meetings between families, but everywhere, even in plays. Who knows where the current interest in drama will lead? Maybe – in time – plays will be written down, though this seems unlikely to me. But if they remain at all, in any form, as spoken words or memory, women should have a share in them. Do we want men to speak for us to future generations?

  “Cholkwa, who has broken many rules before, can certainly break another one and teach you. If he wants the story of his behaviour with the robbers kept quiet, if he wants to keep my son Taiin as a lover, he will co-operate.”

  Taiin and Cholkwa – lovers? For a moment, Dapple was distracted. This certainly explained why Taiin found the boy attractive. How could Cholkwa betray his longtime lover, Perig, for a lame man with one eye?

  Her family’s old friend sighed. “Very well, I’ll take the boy. No question I behaved badly when I mated with his mother. To create life without a contract! It was shameful! And you are right that I should have told my story. Then he would have gotten a proper home as a baby. Now he is old enough to love and mourn those criminals. I will not leave him here to watch his family die.” He paused.

  “And I will take your message to the Helwar. But I don’t like the idea of teaching the girl to act.”

  “If you don’t do it, I will ask Perig, or run off in disguise again!”

  “Have the young always been this much trouble?” Cholkwa asked.

  “Always,” said the matriarch in a firm tone.

  The captain stood up. “My leg aches, and I want either sleep or sex. Take the boy north, so he doesn’t bother me. Take the message, so my mother can be happy. Worry about teaching the girl next year.”

  The two men left, the boy following. He would be put in a room by himself, the captain said as they walked into the house. “It’s been a hard few days for you, Rehv my lad; and I don’t think you need to deal with Ettin boys.”

  Dapple was alone with the matriarch, under a sky patterned with darkness and light.

  “He made me angry when he used the word ‘can’t’ for a woman,” Ettin Hattali said. “No man has the right to say what women can and cannot do. Hah! I am old, to lose my temper and talk about women acting! But I will keep our agreement, young Ahl. What I said about plays is true. They are fine in their way, but they do not tell my story. So many years, struggling to keep my family going toward the front! The purpose of life is not to have honour and die, it’s to have honour and survive, and raise the next generation to be honourable. Who says that in any play?”

  “I will,” said Dapple and felt surprise. Was she actually going to become an actor and write plays? For the first time, her plan seemed possible rather than crazy. Maybe she wouldn’t be dragged back to safety. Maybe, with the matriarch on her side, she could have the life she wanted.

  The moment an idea becomes solid is the moment when another person reaches out and takes it in her grasp. How frightening this is! The fur on Dapple’s shoulders rose. “Do you think Cholkwa will agree to teach me?”

  “Most likely, when he gets used to the idea. He’s a good man, though foreign, and we have been his hosts many times over. That is a bond – not equal to kinship, perhaps, but strong; and there is also a bond between Cholkwa and Taiin. You may not believe this of my son, but he can persuade.”

  They sat a while longer under the stars. A meteor fell, then another. Dapple’s fur was no longer bristling. Instead, her spirit began to expand.

  TWO KNOTS THAT TIE OFF THE STORY

  Cholkwa took the boy as promised, and Rehv travelled with his father’s acting company for several years. But he had no gift for drama and no real liking for travel. Finally, in one harbour town or another, he fell in love. The object of his desire was a glassblower who made floats for fishing nets: good plain work that brought in an adequate income. The two men settled down together. Rehv learned to make glass floats and went on to finer work: halin cups, pitchers for beer, bowls for holding sand or flowers.

  Sometimes he made figures, cast rather than blown: actors, soldiers, matriarchs, robbers, decorated with gold and silver leaf. The actors’ robes were splendid; the weapons held by the soldiers and robbers gleamed; only the matriarchs lacked decoration. They stood on the shelves of his lover’s shop – as green as the ocean, as red as blood, as black as obsidian.

  Most people knew he had been an actor and had settled down because of love. Only his lover knew the entire story. He had grown up amid desperation and craziness; through luck and his own actions, he had managed to achieve an ordinary life.

  Dapple’s relatives agreed to let her learn acting, and Perig agreed to teach her. She travelled with him for several years, accompanied by one of her male cousins, who ended by becoming an actor himself. In time, she established her own company, composed of women. She was always welcome in Ettin, and Ettin Hattali, who lived to be 110, attended Dapple’s performances whenever possible, though towards the end she could no longer see the actors. She could still hear the voices, Hattali told her relatives; and they were the voices of women.

  PEOPLE CAME FROM EARTH

  Stephen Baxter

  Like many of his colleagues writing near the beginning of the new century – Greg Egan comes to mind, as do people like Paul J. McAuley, Michael Swanwick, Iain M. Banks, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Brian Stableford, Gregory Benford, Ian McDonald, Gwyneth Jones, Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, David Marusek, Geoff Ryman, Alastair Reynolds, and a half dozen others – British writer Stephen Baxter has been engaged for the last ten years or so with the task of revitalizing and reinventing the “hard-science” story for a new generation of readers, producing work on the Cutting Edge of science which bristles with weird new ideas and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope.

  Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. He’s one of the most prolific of the new writers of the past decade, and is also rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them. Baxter’s fir
st novel, Raft, was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H.G. Wells pastiche The Time Ships (a sequel to The Time Machine), which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels Voyage, Titan, and Moonseed, and the collections Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence and Traces. His most recent books are the novels Mammoth, Book One: Silverhair and Manifold: Time.

  “People Came from Earth” takes us to a troubled future, to an embattled, desperate world dancing on the brink of extinction, for the autumnal story of people struggling to hold on to what they have . . . and perhaps even regain something of what has been lost.

  AT DAWN I STEPPED out of my house. The air frosted white from my nose, and the deep Moon chill cut through papery flesh to my spindly bones. The silver-grey light came from Earth and Mirror in the sky: twin spheres, the one milky cloud, the other a hard image of the sun. But the sun itself was already shouldering above the horizon. Beads of light like trapped stars marked rim mountain summits, and a deep bloody crimson was working its way high into our tall sky. I imagined I could see the lid of that sky, the millennial leaking of our air into space.

  I walked down the path that leads to the circular sea. There was frost everywhere, of course, but the path’s lunar dirt, patiently raked in my youth, is friendly and gripped my sandals. The water at the sea’s rim was black and oily, lapping softly. I could see the grey sheen of ice farther out, and the hard glint of pack ice beyond that, though the close horizon hid the bulk of the sea from me. Fingers of sunlight stretched across the ice, and grey-gold smoke shimmered above open water.

  I listened to the ice for a while. There is a constant tumult of groans and cracks as the ice rises and falls on the sea’s mighty shoulders. The water never freezes at Tycho’s rim; conversely, it never thaws at the centre, so that there is a fat torus of ice floating out there around the central mountains. It is as if the rim of this artificial ocean is striving to emulate the unfrozen seas of Earth which bore its makers, while its remote heart is straining to grow back the cold carapace it enjoyed when our water – and air – still orbited remote Jupiter.