The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  I had asked if there was enough fuel to reach to coast. Laitel told me he thought so. Besides, we might be able also to charge the solar panel in some clearing, when we were farther from the city and possible surveillance.

  Once, kilometres, years, behind us, there came a faint prolonged boom. But it might only have been some liana-slain tree collapsing in the forest, deceiving us, natural and quite near.

  Night fell. No, it seeped, like water. Exiled from Lohno’s green night garden, here the blackness poured and filled our cup.

  We switched off the machine and went through to the rear on hands and knees. After using the chemical toilet, I did stretching and loosening exercises on my mat. Laitel, moving on his knees as if accustomed to nothing else, put out some cold food and uncorked an evening bottle of wine.

  Later, we lay down. By some mutual reticence, after all not together. We would have little private space during the journey. Only lying alone on our mats, a couple of metres apart, could we achieve any.

  We hadn’t spoken much. Now I said, “The travel-time computes as four days. Five, if vegetation makes for very hard going.”

  “This is the dry season. Growth is less. Four days, perhaps.”

  I said, as he had, previously, “There’s plenty of time. They’ll wait.”

  They would, because we would be among the first of the last groups. For the records, rescue must be shown to be at least partly effective. Even if they didn’t wait, from the open land by the ocean escape must always be easier. Even my people would come, there. I had asked Laitel to let me see the papers Lohno had left for him – and not mentioned in the post-mortem note, presumably having promised earlier. They were good for anything, I thought. I’d been startled in a way Lohno had bothered. Then not startled. He had been so very conscious of our amateur status.

  Soon I heard Laitel sleeping, the slight rustling in respiration he made, asleep. I lay on my back, and through his breath and the shell of the machine, I heard the crickets, and now and then a sharp scream from the forest. I thought of gurricula circling the vehicle with neon eyes. The jungle was alight with such eyes. Eyes hung in trees and the bodies of moss sloths, scrambled and leapt in the heads of coies and monkeys. The pinpoint spangles of rodent eyes scuttled over a floor of roots and bones.

  Visualizing it, I saw them in a speeded-up motion. As in those old photographs of traffic on the Champs Elysées or torch-bearers running on Ho Lilly Way. Streaks, streamers crossing and re-crossing, radiant threads in a labyrinth.

  In the morning, at first light, we went on.

  We talked, even exchanged confidences, that day. It was from boredom, a sort of makeshift antidote to the slight panic I felt keep rising in me, a restless fear of enclosure, inactivity and ennui. For him, the same? Perhaps he talked only to humour or help me. Did he need to talk at all?

  Neither of us, I thought, had anything very original to reveal. Our stories were inevitably products of our places of birth, conditioning, natures. To harshness, tied by rules of social etiquette and religion, and, of course, deprivation, his nature responded, it appeared, with acceptance and calm, nearly uninterested. I suppose for me too, the rules and the dragging up, though different ones – wanting things I couldn’t have – material things, but also glamour, power, success. And my nature was very unlike his. First resentful and at last “sceptical”. A still-hot, calloused nature, though even now wanting, slyly, life to woo me back: See, we didn’t mean it, here is the reward, the prize. And knowing too I didn’t deserve the bloody prize. So. Laitel shone translucently like a dim white pearl. Frances was more garish, costume jewellery, just tinged with jaundiced yellow. Once in a bar someone who claimed to see my aura told me it was shot with anger the colour of fire. Rather than chasten me, I’d been proud of that. Anger, why not?

  After we’d talked – memories, insignificant events – a first bicycle (his), the first date (mine), our work – which had produced both bicycle and first date – servants, both of us, too, in differing, humiliating ways, although he was not humiliated, only I was – we became silent again. But we had got rid of another day.

  Then it was time to crawl into the rear of the machine. And something was disgusting about it now, the proximity, and the smallness of the space. Our smells – mine chemically wiped and deodorized for “freshness”, turning stale, his odourless. A smell of odourlessness. Disturbing. His race don’t sweat. Or if they do, not as my race does. His face, Laitel’s face, was becoming almost genderless to me, exactly like the face of the flower girl who had run away from Lohno’s body, and all the other indigenous faces in his city. Only when they were old, incised by wrinkles, the white teeth, which had no canines, falling or pulled out, only then had there been any look of living in the faces of Laitel’s people. Not really even then. Ugly, beautiful. I thought of the old, old woman I had seen dip her clay cup in the soiled water of the fountain in Que Square. Shrunk small as a European or African child, she might have been sculpted from almond wood, an artefact, those lines and fissures made deliberately by skill, for artistic admiration, not randomly out of pain and age.

  Somehow we edged – or only I did – our mats further apart. We had drunk no wine. The rice had been sticky, and despite the storage unit, hard. A packet of luxury biscuits a sickly cliché out of place.

  His whisper-breathing, when he slept, irritated me. I wanted to wake him up, shut him up. I heard unintelligible words in the whispers, then sounds in the air between them. But there were no real sounds that night. Crickets sometimes. A vague constant rumble we had heard from the moment the machine was switched off, a great waterfall, he said.

  Later though something jumped onto the dome, monkeys or lemasets. Thumps and skitters, the squeak of claws on impervious transparency.

  The equation on the mobex had informed me there was only one more day needed to reach the coast, and Laitel had seemed to think the noise of the fall – the Water-Mama, he called it – confirmed this. But that would mean the mobex’s first computation was wrong. So why not this one?

  When I woke again, it was late in the morning; instinctively I knew. And once I had crawled forward, I saw. One of those breaks had come, this time a vast clearing. The machine was stopped on its edge, screened off only by clumps of bamboo, a flimsy curtain of vines. I hadn’t noticed, somehow, the previous evening, in the failing dusk.

  Here, the perimeter of the clearing was richly green, but running to tobacco-brown farther off. The jungle only came in again, I thought, over a kilometre away. Some little deer were feeding in the middle distance, and there was a ripple of heat haze. The sky was very bright, cat’s-eye colour. Almost midday then. I could no longer hear the fall.

  Neither of us had left the machine before now. There was no need to. Every psychological need to. But without discussion, both of us had seemed to decide to go outside was foolish. The jungle-forest, in Laitel’s language the lunga-rook, is treacherous. Quicksands, poisoned plants and snakes, gurricula, boar . . . an endless list of don’ts.

  But now, Laitel had gone out. He must have done, because the machine, including the toilet and the storage space, was empty. I opened the front compartment. It was filled by batteries and tools for the upkeep of the machine. Lohno Tezmaine’s gun lay slimly alongside.

  I sat in the front seat, turning slowly, looking through the dome into the clearing, and the forest behind us, what I could make out over the machine’s streamlined back.

  Laitel had left the vehicle, and was not to be seen. Had vanished.

  A story I hadn’t bothered to tell him: when I was a child, in my own city, unthinkable wastes of time from here, I’d been left with some relative for an afternoon. I was about five. As it turned out, the relative, an aunt, either real or titular, hadn’t been reliable. Rather like wicked female kin in fairy tales, she had taken me to the park, gone off to buy something, cigarettes I seem to recall, and not remembered to come back. Unnecessary to itemize the stages of my bewildered and tearful panic, the gibbering little nea
r-foetus I eventually became, under those pruned cedars of Hurlingham. Near closing time, a park warden found me. He took me with some trouble – I’d been told never to go with strangers – to the park admin. Here I was rescued presently by a parent.

  It shook me, sitting in the machine, sitting there with the blistering near-noon sunlight coming through the dome, shook me. Laitel gone, and I was that child again. The park, the jungle, the lunga-rook. Don’t go with strangers.

  For God’s sake, I couldn’t drive this thing. I didn’t even know, and couldn’t work out, which button would polarize the dome and stop the glare.

  But come on, I’d been in worse situations. Hadn’t I? Seldom quite alone though. My own kind had been with me. Or another sort of stranger, the sort one believes, for that short period, is an ally, a companion. Or I’d known my way. Had a vehicle I was familiar with, a terrain I was accustomed to or had learned from a tutor. Or no, no, surely there had been times like this. That cellar in Shovsk, that farm at Penn – had I been another person then? Yes, because now I was the child.

  I pushed my panic down.

  He hadn’t gone far. Why would he? Perhaps to verify the fall was there. I could just hear its rumble after all. Somehow the intrusion of other senses – sight, distress – had blocked it out. What reason could Laitel have to leave the safety of the machine in any permanent way? It was his ticket to safety, as it was mine.

  Then again, perhaps he had meant to be gone only a few minutes and something had happened. One of those don’ts, the reasons for never straying outside.

  I picked up the mobex. Static was worse, as it had immediately become once we entered the jungle. I recorded Laitel’s disappearance. My voice sounded steady, unconcerned.

  Then I crawled back into the rear compartment. I’d eat something. Prepare myself . . . About ten minutes later, as I was nibbling a bread cake, I heard a noise on the ladder, then at the cab door. An animal? The door opened, as it only would to a registered handprint.

  I was going to yell out. Relief was flooding through me like boiling then icy water. I paused, and called quietly, “Hi. Where were you?”

  No one answered.

  Then I was frightened. Not the child, other horrors. Was it possible – some battalion of the enemy – Laitel taken, leading them here . . . I scrambled forward, wishing I’d thought to keep the gun with me.

  Sunlight still blared through the cab. The driver’s door was pulled wide, and below, among the cream and green of the bamboo, Laitel was waiting, looking up at me. Alone.

  “What in Christ’s name are you playing at? What do you mean by it? Why the hell didn’t you wake me – tell me you were going to go out? Why don’t you speak for Christ’s sake?”

  “Come and see the fall, Frances, the Water-Mama.”

  “Fuck the fall, what –”

  “It isn’t far, Frances. Come. Come with me.”

  Irradiated in my mind, four words: Now he is crazy.

  Was he? He seemed the same. Enigmatic Laitel, gentle Laitel, the blink of his black tongue between the pale slender lips, the herbivorous teeth of a race that, however, ate meat. The blue inner lids were well raised, only an ink-drawn rim about the eye’s white, the inner black. I’d better be reasonable?

  “Laitel, come back up. I shouldn’t have shouted – I don’t know how it translated. Sorry if it sounded like I was insulting any of your gods – I wasn’t. Only mine. Let’s talk. I was having some breakfast.”

  “Don’t be afraid, Frances. Over there, through the trees, you can see it.”

  My hand had touched open the front compartment. It slipped quickly around metal. I couldn’t drive Lohno’s machine, but I could use his gun. Weapons, somehow, were always easier to learn. I raised it, as if examining the barrel.

  “Laitel, I think you should come and have some coffee. Did you eat?”

  Then Laitel laughed. I’d never seen him laugh, not even in sex, or from nervousness – but then, when had he been nervous? The laugh was musical. Like music. He turned and walked away, back through the loose net of creepers, which he didn’t break, on to the verdant periphery of the clearing.

  “Laitel! Laitel!”

  His profile over his shoulder, half looking back. He shrugged, and walked on, away from me. The way someone does with someone else who is being stupidly obstructive or recalcitrant. Someone not bad, but impeding, for those moments. Someone who you’ll probably forgive, later.

  “Oh God.”

  Only, otherwise, the deer in the clearing, grazing.

  I kept hold of the gun. The door had established my handprint as it had Laitel’s, so I closed it when I got out on the ladder. I jumped down.

  The ground was hot. I could feel it through my boots, and the humidity was intense, far worse than in the city or the garden. Water-drops formed at once on my hair and lashes, trickled down my face – perhaps too it was the nearness of the waterfall, which, out here, seemed suddenly to roar.

  He wasn’t moving fast. I soon caught up to him.

  “What is this, Laitel?” He didn’t speak now, or look at me, but he was slightly smiling. “Why is the fall – the Water-Mama so important?” No answer.

  When we got free of the stands of vegetation, the noon sun was over-powering. The haze rippled, rippled, so the singed grass was like a lake, and the feeding deer seemed to be floating or swimming in it.

  But we got closer and closer to the deer. They didn’t stir. Hadn’t they seen us? Scented us? Especially the scent of an alien –

  “Laitel, Why aren’t the deer –”

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  And then, we were walking right by a deer, a mother, feeding with her fawn beside her. The baby didn’t look up; she flicked us one glance, her ears, full of the juice of youth, fleshy, like leaves, twitching once. Then she lowered her head again.

  We walked between all the deer. Some, this one, this, were less than half a metre from us. And now, compelled, I put out my hand, softly, disbelieving, ran it over the harsh velvet of deer haunches, and the head turned slowly. I glimpsed the long, purple eye – careless, returning to the grass. They smelled of grass, of herbs and fresh dung. Not for a second of fear.

  We were in the middle of the great clearing. Above, the sky, singing out its daffodil green heat. The rumble-rush of water. Some sort of tension in the air, beyond temperature, or haze.

  “Laitel . . . what is it? – what?”

  His hand came out and took my hand, my left hand, which had stroked over the hide of the deer. I hadn’t let that happen at the house. I’d let him kiss me, lick my skin, penetrate me, but not hold my hand in his. He was cool as melon, his palm not dry, not moist, the long fingers wrapping mine. And in my other hand, the hard gun.

  Where the trees and shrubs began to close in again, he turned left, drawing me with him. And then we went down an avenue, a kind of path, like the paths in Lohno’s garden. It might have been some lane or by-way of the city, a grassy walk off Flower Street. As we moved along it, a gurricula paced out of the trees on one side, crossed the track before us, and went in among the trees the other side. It was like a shadow, almost I seemed to see through it, but it was real. The size of a large dog, full-grown. It could have killed both of us with ease, or also I could have shot it, I suppose. It hadn’t spared us a look. And we – neither of us – had slowed down or hesitated.

  The avenue ended and the trees opened out, giving way to slender shiroyas with their dainty paper-chains of foliage, and beyond the land hollowed, dropped, and there, hung in vastness and distance, and below, a cliff of malachite wreathed in steam and haloed by spray, and the great fall of Water-Mama, a woman’s crumble-white hair combed down and down to a shining river like an olive serpent half the world beneath.

  It was beautiful. And the noise of it, and the taste of its spume, mineral as iron on the mouth.

  We stood, looking. What else. It seemed, as I’d meant to be when trying to call him back, reasonable. This mattered. Or rather, nothing el
se did, much.

  To one side, Laitel’s side, the rock shelved up, with the shiroyas clinging, trailing their streamers. One of the old derelict temples was there, with the beehive tops I’d seen in photex prints of Calor Eye, or Angk. Stone galleries wove in and out of the rock, trooped by statues, their faces mostly smoothed away by time and wet.

  As I stared, birds flew up and swirled across all the faces, the statues’, the temple’s.

  Our hands had let go. At the same instant I must have dropped the gun. It lay in the fern at the ground’s edge.

  Laitel knelt down, his knees and calves folded under him. I gazed at his hair, that colour which is no colour I can name, the hair of his race, which never changes even in extreme old age, one hundred, one hundred and fifty of our years.

  I felt very tired. I wanted to sit, too. So I sat, beside him. I crossed my legs and leaned my elbow on my thigh, my chin on my hand, curved forward, gazing over to the narrow river like a snake.

  When it began to get dark I don’t know. Sunset, presumably. I must have slept, but I hadn’t moved.

  Firebugs burned softly in the bushes, darting about like all those gleaming eyes I’d imagined, but now unencumbered by heads or bodies. I had an urge to coax them to my fingers. Would they come?

  Stars were strewn over the sky, hardening as the light disbanded. But the sky is always less dark than the world. The starry night of space. So, could I coax down the stars?

  “Laitel, we should go back to the machine.”

  But when I looked at him, once again, he was no longer with me.

  Lohno had described this spot, or another like it, in several books. The image was recurrent – the Water-Mama Fall, the temple. Therefore, I must have seen it in post-tutor dreams. It was subtly familiar. However, I’d only realized this when I woke there, and again found Laitel had gone.