The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Roger says.

  Eileen shakes her head, looking down. She is bitterly cold, and the wind whistles through the broken branches and the grain of the wood. “It’s dead, Roger.”

  “What’s that?”

  “ ‘The darkness grew apace,’ ” she mutters, looking away from him. “ ‘A cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east.’ ”

  “What’s that you say?”

  “The Time Machine,” she explains. “The end of the world. ‘It would be hard to convey the stillness of it.’ ”

  “Ah,” Roger says, and puts his arm around her shoulders. “Still the English major.” He smiles. “All these years pass and we’re still just what we always were. You’re an English major from the University of Mars.”

  “Yes.” A gust seems to blow through her chest, as if the wind had suddenly struck her from an unexpected quarter. “But it’s all over now, don’t you see? It’s all dead” – she gestures – “everything we tried to do!” A desolate plateau over an ice sea, a forest of dead trees; all their efforts gone to waste.

  “Not so,” Roger says, and points up the hill. Freya and Jean-Claude are wandering down through the dead forest, stopping to inspect certain trees, running their hands over the icy spiral grain of the wood, moving on to the next magnificent corpse.

  Roger calls to them, and they approach together. Roger says under his breath to Eileen, “Now listen, Eileen, listen to what they say. Just watch them and listen.”

  The youngsters join them, shaking their heads and babbling at the sight of the broken-limbed forest. “It’s so beautiful!” Freya says. “So pure!”

  “Look,” Roger interrupts, “don’t you worry everything will all go away, just like this forest here? Mars become unlivable? Don’t you believe in the crash?”

  Startled, the two stare at him. Freya shakes her head like a dog shedding water. Jean-Claude points west, to the vast sheet of ice sea spread below them. “It never goes backward,” he says, halting for words. “You see all that water out there, and the sun in the sky. And Mars, the most beautiful planet in the world.”

  “But the crash, Jean-Claude. The crash.”

  “We don’t call it that. It is a long winter only. Things are living under the snow, waiting for the next spring.”

  “There hasn’t been a spring in thirty years! You’ve never seen a spring in your life!”

  “Spring is L-s zero, yes? Every year spring comes.”

  “Colder and colder.”

  “We will warm things up again.”

  “But it could take thousands of years!” Roger exclaims, enjoying the act of provocation. He sounds like all the people in Burroughs, Eileen thinks, like Eileen herself when she is feeling the despair of the crash.

  “I don’t care,” Freya says.

  “But that means you’ll never see any change at all. Even with really long lives you’ll never see it.”

  Jean-Claude shrugs. “It’s the work that matters, not the end of work. Why be so focused on the end? All it means is you are over. Better to be in the middle of things, or at the beginning, when all the work remains to be done, and it could turn out any way.”

  “It could fail,” Roger insists. “It could get colder, the atmosphere could freeze out, everything in the world could die like these trees here. Nothing left alive at all.”

  Freya turns her head away, put off by this. Jean-Claude sees her and for the first time he seems annoyed. They don’t understand what Roger has been doing, and now they are tired of it. Jean-Claude gestures at the stark landscape: “Say what you like,” he says. “Say it will all go crash, say everything alive now will die, say the planet will stay frozen for thousands of years – say the stars will fall from the sky! But there will be life on Mars.”

  THE SKY-GREEN BLUES

  Tanith Lee

  Here’s perhaps one of the strangest stories you’re likely to read this year, one that takes you to a world where nothing is what it seems for a story that goes no place that you’d expect it to take you . . .

  Tanith Lee is one of the best-known and most prolific of modern fantasists, with more than sixty books to her credit, including (among many others) The Birthgrave, Drinking Sapphire Wine, Don’t Bite the Sun, Night’s Master, The Storm Lord, Sung in Shadow, Volkhavaar, Anackire, Night’s Sorceries, Black Unicorn, Days of Grass, The Blood of Roses, Vivia, Reigning Cats and Dogs, When the Lights Go Out, Elephantasm, and The Gods Are Thirsty, and the collections Tamastara, The Gorgon, Dreams of Dark and Light, Nightshades, and The Forests of Night. Her short story “The Gorgon” won her a World Fantasy Award in 1983, her short story “Elle Est Trois (La Mort)” won her another World Fantasy Award in 1984, and her brilliant collection of retold folk tales, Red as Blood, was also a finalist that year (in the Best Collection category). Her most recent book is a new novel, Faces Under Water, and forthcoming are new novels St Fire, Mortal Suns, and The Immortal Moon. She lives with her husband and two cats in the south of England.

  THERE, THE NIGHTS were always green. He had filled the garden with lamps of waxed paper, some on poles, some hanging from the boughs of trees. Inside each one was a candle. The manservant trimmed, replaced, lit them, at sunset, going up and down the narrow paths, between the palms and the bamboos, the huge rhododendrons and cunibaias. As light faded from the sky, instead the garden filled with it, as if it had sucked the light down, the reason for night. And in the darkness, as the crickets remorselessly scratched, the garden pulsed green as jade.

  A great moth, with the wing-span of a sparrow, fluttered through the garden, trying to immolate itself in a lamp, any lamp.

  “The aperture in these lamps is too small for the big moths to penetrate,” he said with satisfaction.

  He liked that, cheating a moth of its suicide.

  In the verandah, the single oil lamp made his face very yellow. He was old, about 70, or older, carved with wrinkles, a life’s work. His name was Lohno Tezmaine.

  “You’re cruel,” I remarked.

  “Why? Because I won’t let the moth kill itself? Yes, Frances, that’s probably true.”

  But it was more than that. The carving of his face showed his cruelty. It was cruelty, his 70 or more years of cruel jeers and patronizing smiles and frowns, that had formed its present shape.

  I thought, briefly, what would mine show, if I lived so long? Indolence, perhaps, indecision.

  But he said, suddenly, “Laitel says the enemy are almost here. Tomorrow, the next day.”

  Laitel was the manservant. He heard things when he went shopping in the market for rice, roots, meat and fruit, and other staples of Lohno’s house.

  “What will you do?” I asked.

  “Nothing. What can I do?”

  “Get away. Surely you could.”

  “You mean my machine? But where would I go?”

  “The coast?” I suggested.

  He did not reply.

  We were silent. Then he said, “I take it you have no plans to go, yourself.”

  “I don’t know yet. I’m supposed to stay, I promised I would. That is, as long as you do. But when it comes to the point . . . I don’t know.”

  “As a woman, you’re in more danger. At the worst they’ll only kill me. I mean, even if they torture me, I haven’t much stamina. Soon over. But you’re young.”

  “Forty,” I said idly. “Forty-one next month.”

  “Young enough,” he said. “And we’ve heard the stories of what they do with females. Alien females.”

  “Yes. I’ll run away then.”

  “Then should you leave tonight?”

  His face was beaky and the cruel lines sharpened. As with the moth, he didn’t like to let me have my death.

  “No. That isn’t necessary.”

  “Do you want the machine?” he asked abruptly. Was this sinister, this offer?

  “I wouldn’t be able to drive it.”

  “Laitel could show you.”

  “I’m not ve
ry good with new mechanical things.”

  “It would get you to the coast. That’s where the airlift will be. If there is one.”

  “I’d rather not.” Reluctantly I added, “Thank you.”

  He raised the crystal bottle and poured another pequa for himself, and next for me.

  “Cheers,” said Lohno.

  We drank, and somewhere at the garden’s end, where the cultivated wilderness dropped down in stony levels to the thin surface waters and the glutinous mudtrees of the swamp, a gurricula gave its long hoarse cry.

  “Out hunting,” he said. “When the enemy come in things will be easier for it. They lose their skills, you know,” he added to me, “creatures, when there are wars. A buffet’s laid on for them of the dead. They get lazy. But then I’ve heard the enemy shoot scavengers.”

  When I was on the outer stair going up to the roof, I looked down, and glimpsed the gurricula, at the garden’s end. Its long pale body, half lamplit and freckled by shadows, was nosing in Lohno’s rubbish tip. Presently it pulled out a curious thing that looked like a paperbound book. Either Lohno or Laitel or some eccentric neighbour must have flung it there. With this in its jaws the gurricula loped away, its eyes gleaming. It appeared mindless; ugly and beautiful at the same moment. Animals often look like that to me. And, I confess, other races.

  Laitel, for example, with his long eyes, the pupil and iris indistinguishable and black, the inner, bluish lid. His face was a perfect oval, feminine in its hairless smoothness. As with many of his people, his tongue was black, and rough as a cat’s. He was slightly shorter than I, slim and small-boned, his skin so white that, when I put my hand upon it, every time I felt a transgressor.

  Looking at Laitel, all Laitel’s race, I could see no soul in them. Or do I mean, no physical soul, the personality.

  Despite, or because of that, we had been having sex together almost every night.

  My apartment was on the roof, an old summer-house of bamboo, with waxed paper shutters rolled up to let in the humid and unmoving air.

  I went in and pushed my things about on the table. Then I sat on the sofa and tried the mobex. Nothing came through but static. The firm, excited voices which had asked me if I would stay to see the fall of the city were blocked off from me by some noiseless electric storm high above, or some powerful ray discharged across the sea. It was possible my communicating link would not clear in time to allow me to deliver a report. I would have to record it, then. Sometime they would be able to access this recording, even if, by then, the mobex were a kilometre down in the swamp, and I in some coffle of women, chained at the ankle, and driven southward, in service to the soldiers of the enemy.

  Below, the yellow oil-light shifted from the verandah. A patch of darkness formed there, intensifying the liquid jades of the garden.

  When I came to the house, to interview Lohno Tezmaine, I had known there would be danger. But I’d wanted to see the city. In the first three or four days, in the mornings before Lohno got out of bed, I’d walked about, or taken the hutshas, pulled by ponies, by men, women or even teams of six children – eight were needed for the heavier traveller. So I saw, and photexed, the old mansions of Flower Street, six kilometres of them, like ice sculptures, and the lush gardens with their blazing winter flowers. Also the temples in Que Square, and the fountain, with its columns and serpents, the water playing rather dry and brown that day, but people still drinking from it. I had photexed the Duval Library, the Earthlight Hotel and the Monument to Silence. I did spend one morning in the jush, photexing the shacks and huts, the tin roofs jolly with rust from summer rains, the dyeworks where the swamp is poison-iris-colour. But you see such things everywhere. That was only duty.

  Lohno never got up till lunch. Lunch was his first meal. Overscores of little dishes – shoots and beans fried in peanut oil, salt mangoes, scrambled eggs and pig meat, rice, bread, jam, coffee, I placed questions before him. Sometimes he answered them.

  Everything was nothing to Lohno. He had done so much. His only goal seemed to be this latent intent one – of preventing others from experiencing anything. On the first morning he had said, in answer to my enquiry about his daughter, whether he sheltered her so severely because he feared his rivals would harm her, that he was “good at” living, but she had seemed not to be. He added that most of us, of all races and types, seemed to have “no notion of how to be alive”. And so we were best protected from the state.

  “Can you clarify that a little?” I had asked.

  “Take yourself,” he said at once. He was like a lot of interviewees, I thought, eager to turn the tables at once and humiliatingly get my story. But it wasn’t that, “Here you are, millions of miles from home, out on a limb. War all around us. A hostile force advancing to take this city. Everything precarious. Why did you come?”

  “To talk to you.”

  “But why? Don’t tell me there’s still any interest in me. There shouldn’t be. I haven’t done anything for 30 years.”

  “Perhaps that’s why.”

  He ignored that. “You came here because you wanted to experience something. A new thing. And that is how most of you are. Either you hide from life or you leap and dive into life. But life is a deep river with a cloudy bottom. There may be carnivorous beasts, venomous fish and rocks, there, under the surface.”

  “I concede that.”

  “Do you? This is what I mean. You are all of you amateurs at living.”

  I said, reasonably I thought, “Then, speaking as a life-professional, how would you do it? What would you do?”

  He had laughed. “It’s like any creative art. It isn’t to be taught. Either the gift is there, or it isn’t.”

  Lohno’s daughter, he went on to say, had anyway escaped his protection. She had run off with a gangster, and lived in a mean apartment somewhere, bearing him babies. She had had her tongue pierced, he said. And his cruelty-construct face leered.

  “That’s significant?”

  “Think about it.”

  “I have. The salience eludes me.”

  He condescended to ask, “For what is a tongue used?”

  “To talk, to eat. In sex.”

  “And it has no bone, does it? But she’s put something rigid and hard right through its softness.”

  I shook my head. “Mr Tezmaine –”

  “Lohno, I told you.”

  “Lohno. I still don’t –”

  Then he laughed again. “Forget it.”

  When I had been with him, the first days, I had the urge always, afterwards, to take a shower. That passed. It was a strange reaction. He was perfectly clean, physically, and I preferred to shower first or last thing in the day.

  I was in the shower of the summer-house now, when Laitel came into the room.

  He made no noise at all, and by that, somehow, I heard him. And then he switched on the ceiling fan, and I heard that.

  When I came out in my robe, he was turning down the sheet on my camp-bed. He had put a dish of fruit on the table. There was always some excuse to come up here, in case I didn’t welcome him, I thought, or he decided against it.

  The fan made its insectile noise, rather like the blades of the VTOs which would rescue everyone at the coastal pick-up. Or so I had been told.

  “Do you have what you want for the night?” asked Laitel.

  “Yes. Thanks for the fruit. Is the fan all right?”

  “The generator’s recharged. Leave it on if you wish.”

  Apart from the great moths, one of which, or the same one as before, was again sailing anxiously about the green garden, few insects survived in the city. Fallout from communication rays, supposedly harmless to people, had polished most of them off, even most of the striped ants.

  I went over to Laitel, leaned and kissed him lightly. We walked to the bed, discarded our garments and lay down.

  This sex was always pleasant, easy and rhythmic, without demanding excitement or any conclusion. Neither of us experienced orgasm. We caressed and moved, c
omfortably slotted together, until we grew bored, then separating, I with a mild sense of something achieved. Satisfied. If he was, I don’t know. I thought I had made it apparent I would do what he needed to achieve orgasm, but he too seemed indifferent. Merely we valued the mutual message of our bodies. I suspected that, for Laitel, the climax of the act was of use only with his own kind, and in the interests of procreation.

  I made tea for us on the battery hot-plate. It was nice to do something for him. All day and sometimes during the night, he had to wait on Lohno, and now too on me.

  We drank the tea.

  “Did he throw a book out for the rubbish?” I asked. I wasn’t really interested. But Laitel said, “Yes. One of his own. Now and then he throws one away.”

  “I suppose it won’t matter. There are copies of all his books in Optimum, all available on disc.”

  “No, it won’t matter.”

  “Why does he do it?”

  Laitel said, expressionless as he always was, “He enjoys to.”

  When Laitel left me, I recorded this fact with the others.

  I had asked Laitel, during our first time alone, what he thought of Lohno Tezmaine. Laitel said, “I serve him.”

  Although the chip one gets to wear now, in the flesh of the right arm, enables one to understand and be understood in any language, sometimes there are little discrepancies.

  “You mean, as his servant.”

  “His servant.” Laitel’s voice was not a mask, however. Again, I detected something. I said, “Does he – excuse me, but has he slept with you?”

  “Oh no. I don’t mean that.”

  We got no further. It had been as enigmatic as with Tezmaine.

  Tonight, before Laitel left me, and I recorded his comment on the book, I had asked the more relevant thing.

  “Laitel, if the enemy break through, if the city falls –”

  “They will. Yes?”