The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  “What will you do?”

  “What can I do?” Lohno’s answer. Exactly.

  “Come on, Laitel. It’s going to be dangerous. They’ll be merciless to you – won’t they, the enemy?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you have a family here?”

  “No.” He added, “I was born in the jush. Not wanted.”

  “Then you should” – now I spoke Tezmaine’s lines – “get away.”

  “I have no papers, Frances.”

  “I can print you up some good false ones on the mobex. Enough to pass. Get you to the coast.” His black eyes glanced at me. Beautiful, ugly, soulless. Or solely soul. “Lohno said you know how to drive the machine.”

  “I have done so, sometimes, for him.”

  “Then why don’t you take it, and go? He isn’t afraid. I don’t think he’d bother if you went. You’d stand a chance, wouldn’t you?”

  Beyond the city were the swamps, the secret rivers, mudtrees and boyuns, enormous tracts of jungle packaged over the ruins of haunted temples, where white monkeys and coies were the shrieking ghosts.

  “But the airlift,” he said coolly, “it’s for your kind, Frances. Aliens who are wanting to escape.”

  “It’s for whoever they can squeeze in the transports. Believe me, Laitel, I’ve seen this kind of thing before. And if I give you papers, you’ll be fine.”

  “You,” he said.

  I took him to mean, why not me.

  “My people promised to pick me up. They said me and Lohno, actually, that was part of the deal. He’d give us the interview and we’d get him out. But he won’t discuss that – gave the interview anyway – pretends I never offered it. He doesn’t care. Or he fancies the experience of the Vae Victis.”

  “Will your people come?”

  I thought about it. “Maybe. They usually have in the past. But I should have checked tonight, and the intercom is out.”

  That was all we said.

  When Laitel left, after I’d recorded the thing about the book, I lay under the sheet and watched the ceiling fan.

  It occurred to me I might be stranded here. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t believe any real harm could come to me. It never had, and I had been in many situations of peril. Somehow there was always an escape clause, a stroke of luck.

  Suddenly, out beyond the raised paper shutters, a violent white flare exploded in the sky. Then came a wooden bang, which reverberated oddly, making the light furniture in the summer-house rock.

  This had happened 15 times before, once for every night I had been here. They were only signal rockets, put up at irregular hours to disturb the sleep of the city. Reminders from the enemy that they were almost here.

  The city would fall like an angel, its stones, gardens, and the accretions of all the aliens who had possessed it and hung on it their jewellery of buildings and fountains, streets and malls. In the firelight, after the close-range bombing began and ended, the true citizens would suffer only one more invasion. I visualized long lines of people driven away before the conqueror, like channels of water running from a tap.

  I tried the mobex one last time, got static, recorded my thoughts in a sort of embarrassment, these neatly quilted phrases from the handbook of an articulate eyewitness.

  In the very late mornings, sometimes a local girl came to the house, bringing garlands of white flowers and long-stemmed scented yasti. She would go straight in to Lohno’s bedroom on the ground floor, but come out again after only a few minutes. In the verandah she would stand counting coins, then arrange some flowers about the lunch table.

  That day she came. I was leaning on the roof-rail, drying my hair. I watched her go in, and then, after less than 50 seconds, come hurrying back.

  Looking over, I saw her stop still, in the garden just below the verandah, as if undecided. The sunlight shone on her colourless hair. Then she stared straight up at me. The blue inner lids were shut fast over her eyes, a thing that happens to Laitel’s race only in extreme agitation or grief. Next second, clutching her flowers, she ran away along the path and vanished in the rhododendrons.

  I hesitated. Then I went down. Laitel was away, I thought, still at the market. These excursions had begun to take much longer. As the enemy drew nearer and more near, less food came in from the surrounding countryside, and fewer people remained to sell it.

  The verandah kept its morning shadow, only in the afternoon did full sun reach it. The girl had dropped a single yasti there on the floor, as if leaving us a gift.

  Inside, the passage, marble-tiled, swept twice daily by Laitel, gleamed in green sunlight. I passed the double bamboo doors of the dining room and came to the carved palmwood door that marked Lohno’s room.

  He had never invited me in here. I had never been in the room, though I’d glimpsed it. Now the door stood ajar, something that normally never happened until he had risen, leaving the bed gaping for Laitel to tidy.

  It was a white room, a dull sallow faded white. He’d never used blinds but curtains of thin white silk, parchment colour now. Things were strewn about, as I’d seen before, glancing in as I passed, a leather-bound book on the floor, others over a straw chair. A water bottle stood by the bed and Lohno Tezmaine was stretched across the mattress. There had been insect-netting, and he had left it hanging there, though unclosed. It looked like cobwebs somehow. Or a spider’s web, in which he lay.

  When I bent over him I saw what I expected. He was dead. Feeling for a pulse, although I did so, was superfluous, and going to fetch the mobex to check for life signs would be futile. The syringe lay under his right hand.

  He was smiling. There might be a lot of reasons for that, the fake amusement of setting rigour, or something in the drug he had used which made him feel good as it finished him. I was inclined to think, though, that he was pleased with himself. A life-professional would assume he knew the perfect moment to die.

  His note was under a glass with some dregs of pequa in it. He had written in an obscure picture script that only the chip made me able to read – Laitel, very likely, wouldn’t have made it out.

  No reason for you to hang about here now, is there? he had written. Take the machine and go. Use the old road. Laitel knows. So long, for now. L.

  When I turned, Laitel was in the doorway. If he felt anything, I’d never be sure.

  “Of course, he’s dead,” I announced.

  Laitel came and looked. He pointed to the syringe. “He kept it ready. He showed me once. He said, Don’t be astonished, one morning.”

  We left him there, shut the door, and walked back out to the verandah. A horrible whistling note had begun over the city. They were testing the sirens as, during the last two or three days, they had sometimes done, at midday and late in the afternoon. Birds in the garden screamed, fell silent, and abruptly flew off with great clappings of wings.

  “I suppose that’s it,” I said. “Could you read his note?”

  “No.”

  “But you can guess what it said?”

  Laitel spoke slowly. “I’m to take the money and papers in his safe. Then drive the machine along the old road through the swamp, to the old wall.”

  “I see.”

  The sirens shut off. The quiet was a relief. Somewhere a frog croaked and then there was another noise.

  Instinctively we looked up, beyond the verandah to the heat-drained emerald of the sky. There was nothing to see, but the droning rushing sound grew insistently louder.

  “That wasn’t a practice,” I managed to say before the concussion blasted out. The flash was only a flicker, simultaneous. The earth trembled.

  Somewhere not too near, faint cries, a temple bell ringing.

  We waited. Nothing else happened, and the cries gradually diminished, the bell stopped.

  “That sounded like the commercial area. It was a Sing rocket,” I said. “Popular everywhere.” Suddenly I laughed. To my surprise I seemed very slightly hysterical. “I could do with a bloody drink.”

  Lai
tel reached out as if to take my hand. His touch would be cool and calming, for a moment.

  “Everything’s happening at once,” I said.

  But I had evaded, withdrawn my own hand, and now ran along the verandah, up the stairs to the roof.

  The mobex gave me an immediate clear connection.

  “Hi, Frances. What’s the news?”

  I told them.

  “You don’t say? Then I guess you’d like to leave . . .” A patch of static came, not really interrupting the hiatus.

  I waited.

  The man’s voice said, “Tricky. Storms. How long before they get to you? Our reports give a unit, ten days even.”

  “No, less. It could even be today. A rocket just came down. They fire a few Sings, don’t they, to get us in the mood. Then they march in or chute down. Both.”

  “Yes. The city government’s fled. Guess you know. That was two days ago.”

  “I know.”

  “Night pick-up. Private VTO, usual stuff. Nice. Listen, Frances, keep the line open.”

  Over the summer-house, sudden, with no warning, rushed a vast roaring pterodactyl. Instinctively I threw myself flat. The detonation came next moment with a flash like lightning. The house, everything, shook. Things cascaded from the table. The chronic untidiness of war.

  “That was another. Quite close.”

  “Heard it, Frances. Keep the line open. Speak to you soon.”

  The mobex went silent, save for recurring patches of static.

  No sirens now. They hadn’t bothered. I crouched by the camp-bed, while three more rockets tore over, and three more thunders opened the city.

  Finally time passed with nothing. Crickets had started again. I got up. The sky was bruised. Smoke from the bombardment rose in three or four thick columns beyond the palms and sul trees that shielded the front of Lohno’s house. Screams and wails still rose irregularly up in it, and long glissandi of tumbling glass.

  I took the mobex with me when I went down, and dumped it on a straw chair in the verandah. Laitel was putting dishes on the table, rice and spinach, slivers of meat in sauce, the big bottle of Pinot Greve Lohno always had at lunch, in a cooler.

  After a moment, Laitel said, “They will come?”

  “I don’t know. Yes. I’m not sure.”

  I sat down, picked up my napkin, looked at the food.

  Laitel poured a glass of wine for me.

  “Please sit down, Laitel.” He looked at me. “Oh sit down. He’s dead. The city’s being bombed. Have some fucking lunch with me.”

  He sat and ate, and drank a little wine. It seemed familiar, as if I had somewhere seen a photograph of him eating at this table, and so wondered if he had, with Lohno, quite often, before I arrived.

  Although I drank two or three glasses of the wine, it made little impression on me. Laitel rose and went into the house, and returned after ten minutes with coffee. He served me, then sat again. He said, “A boy came to the front verandah just now. He had a dead aie bird. He said it was killed when a rocket hit one of the gardens.” I looked at Laitel, not comprehending. “He said we could have it, for food. No payment necessary.”

  “So?”

  “He was staring all the time into the house, to see who is here. We are only two or three persons. He will tell others, and they’ll come back.”

  “I see. Looters.”

  “Taking what they can, before the enemy come. And they will know about you.”

  I glanced at the mobex, half reached out for it, and let my hand fall.

  Over Lohno’s walls and trees, a new dim sound was beginning to well through the city. It was febrile, almost festive. I’d heard such noises before. I pictured the crowds on Flower Street, windows that had survived the Sings, smashing.

  “Will you take the machine, Laitel?”

  “Yes. I’ve seen the papers in the safe. They will do.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  “Yes.”

  I got up. “Let me put a couple of things together.”

  “Don’t be in a great hurry,” he said. “They won’t come back until it’s cooler. Maybe not till sunset. I’ll see to the machine.”

  It didn’t occur to me he would go without me. I don’t know why not. What was there between us? The palest sex and a communication chip.

  As I stuffed my bag I thought of the flower girl. I was sorry for her. I wondered if Laitel were washing the lunch dishes, the glasses, carefully by hand as he usually did, but when I came back down, they were still on the table, and a tiny contingent of ants had appeared, crawling over the plates, drowning in the last centimetres of wine.

  I picked up the mobex: static issued from it. I spoke my plans into the recorder-relay, the plan of Lohno’s machine and the journey to the coast, then turned it off. I knew, they wouldn’t have come.

  Over the sky a narrow flying craft leisurely drifted. It might have been a spy-plane of the city, but I thought not. Enemy reconnaissance. The sun was passing over and the shadows lengthening out from the cunibaias, where lemasets were playing now, the silvery boughs dipping and swaying as they sprang.

  Laitel appeared below. “We’ll go now, if you’re ready.”

  “Yes.”

  He had nothing with him. Perhaps he had nothing of his own, wanted nothing that wasn’t his own. But he said, “The machine is primed. I’ve loaded it up with food, and gas. I’ve put Lohno’s gun into the compartment.”

  We walked along the narrow garden paths, threading between the waxed-paper candle lamps, which tonight nobody would light, the moths searching in vain for death. Death instead would be in Lohno’s bedroom, with tiny trickles of ants foraging over him. Or the gurricula might get in at a window.

  Or the house, ransacked by the neighbours, the boy with the aie bird, might be burning, so giving the moths a chance after all.

  Out of its port, the machine squatted below the stone levels, on the edge of the old road where the swamp began. It was camouflage green, sky green and green-tawny, like the jungle-forest, the mudtrees and boyuns and palms. It had a look of power, armoured, muscular and big-snouted like some beast. This vehicle had been regularly cared for, oiled and exercised, its batteries charged and fed. Not wild, only savage, then, an expensive dray animal.

  I went up the metal ladder and swung into the cab. Laitel took the driver’s seat. He closed the machine’s transparent armoured lid.

  The house was invisible from here. A great quiet, a Sunday quiet, had descended over the city, which might only have been resting, dozing after an opulent family meal. Starlings flickered across the sky, two lemasets cackled in a giant rhododendron.

  Before I came to the city, since I hadn’t read any of Lohno Tezmaine’s books, I had to use a preprogrammed tutor to speak them over to me in sleep. Following these sessions, consciously I hadn’t at first remembered anything, though my sleep had been peppered with dislocated dreams. Gradually the input settled. When it came to the interviews with him, I had enough to ask the right questions. Nevertheless I was fairly sure he suspected my method. Had he despised me? Probably not. He was indifferent.

  As we went deeper into the jungle, only then did I begin to see Lohno’s books, as it were, made flesh. Obviously, the ones he’d written after he came to live in the city.

  On my arrival I hadn’t seen much, only a map-like image unfolding under me just before the swift glide-down to the airstrip. A modern subway capsule had run me into the city – Europeans built it, this subway, the Grande Metrolux. They’d been proud of it once, like their library and the handful of mansions in period style, which they planted on Flower Street. But everyone had left markers there, Rus, Statesiders, Afro-Celt, Exastra.

  Once war had washed over, destroying and processing small, the jungle itself would lay claim to the city, and then the city would go back to being like the rest, like the landscape we had now entered.

  At first the old road coiled through the swamp, and then came a shanty town, the tin roofs and huts like the jush, b
ut better, worse, broken up by trees and water and bubbling marshes railed with clacking reeds. The old wall carved across everything, ruined, and ancient almost as prehistory. Strong lemon light of a dying afternoon slid on the stones as the machine, oblivious, bumped through a gap. Our treads made nothing of the little shards and large smoothed pebbles. A turquoise fisher-bird stood sentinel by a pool, staring at us as we left the city behind and entered the funnel of the forest.

  At first, impressive, the huge flags of apparently tarnished, heavy bronze, the leaves of plantain and gigantic, full-grown boyun. Flags indeed, banners sweeping and scraping on the machine’s dome. Towering trees roped with lianas that would eventually strangle and pull them down. In flights of firework brilliance, parakeets went spraying up between, to be lost in the higher thinner canopy, where still, for about half an hour, glimpses of sky were visible, luminous yet flat-looking, like trompe l’oeil, a painted ceiling.

  Then the overhead vista closed.

  The machine ploughed on without pause, breaking through tender angelica creepers, snapping the boughs of cunibaia and black fig. Here and there, the automatics, meeting tougher growth, produced a whirl of blades and sliced vegetation. Green blood sprayed on the front screen of the dome, and was instantly wiped away.

  Shade had deepened to the night-day of the jungle-forest. But hours had passed. Soon true night would come. Darkness.

  “After dark we’d better stop, Laitel, had we?”

  “Yes, I think so. Certainly tonight.”

  The machine lights were vital. Their heat if not their beam might be detectable by anything watching from the sky. How dedicated the enemy were to detaining all peoples in the city I didn’t know. Perhaps not very. With me, an alien, they had no real quarrel. But I was on my own, and travelling with one of the enemy’s enemies.

  It seemed such an easy rule to follow, to turn off the machine once night came, crawl through into the rear compartment and sleep until sunrise. Not even any awkwardness. We had slept together, in both senses, many times already.

  Claustrophobic, though, the jungle-forest. And then, every so often, a sort of agoraphobia – a break in the forest with a view of cascading rock and leaning, half-falling trunks, bamboos like waterfalls of liquid fabric, some defile far below, twice with a tribe of blond monkeys, their shouts of alarm clearly audible above the machine’s low humming, the steady soft pump-pump of the gas mixture.