The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  Only a little way from the main road, the forest is still, except for the subdued chirping of birds. He is in a warm, green womb. Under the acacia trees, he finds an old ruin, one of the many nameless remains of Delhi’s medieval era. After checking for snakes or scorpions, he curls up under a crumbling wall and dozes off.

  Some time later, when the sun is lower in the sky and the heat not as intense, he hears a tapping sound, soft and regular, like slow rain on a tin roof. He sees a woman – a young girl – on the paved path in front of him, holding a cane before her. She’s blind, obviously, and lost. This is no place for a woman alone. He clears his throat and she starts.

  “Is someone there?”

  She’s wearing a long blue shirt over a salwaar of the same color, and there is a shawl around her shoulders. The thin material of her dupatta drapes her head, half covering her face, blurring her features. He looks at her and sees the face in the printout. Or thinks he does.

  “You are lost,” he says, his voice trembling with excitement. He fumbles in his pockets for the printout. Surely he must still be asleep and dreaming. Hasn’t he dreamed about her many, many times already? “Where do you wish to go?”

  She clutches her stick. Her shoulders slump.

  “Naya Diwas Lane, good sir. I am traveling from Jaipur. I came to meet my sister, who lives here, but I lost my papers. They say you must have papers. Or they’ll send me to Neechi-Dilli with all the poor and the criminals. I don’t want to go there! My sister has money. Please, sir, tell me how to find Naya Diwas.”

  He’s never heard of Naya Diwas Lane, or Neechi Dilli. New Day Lane? Lower Delhi? What strange names. He wipes the sweat off his forehead.

  “There aren’t any such places. Somebody has misled you. Go back to the main road, turn right, there is a marketplace there. I will come with you. Nobody will harm you. We can make enquiries there.”

  She thanks him, her voice catching with relief. She tells him she’s heard many stories about the fabled city and its tall, gem-studded minars that reach the sky, and the perfect gardens. And the ships, the silver udankhatolas, that fly across worlds. She’s very excited to be here at last in the Immaculate City.

  His eyes widen. He gets up abruptly, but she’s already fading away into the trees. The computer printout is in his hand, but before he can get another look at her, she’s gone.

  What has he told her? Where is she going, in what future age, buoyed by the hope he has given her, which (he fears now) may be false?

  He stumbles around the ruin, disturbing ground squirrels and a sleepy flock of jungle babblers, but he knows there is no hope of finding her again except by chance. Temporal coincidences have their own unfathomable rules. He’s looked ahead to this moment so many times, imagined both joy and despair as a result of it, but never this apprehension, this uncertainty. He looks at the computer printout again. Is it mere coincidence that the apparition he saw looked like the image? What if Pandit Vidyanath’s computer generated something quite random, and that his quest, his life for the past few years, has been completely pointless? That Om Prakash or Vidyanath (if he exists) is enjoying an intricate joke at his expense? That he has allowed himself to be duped by his own hopes and fears?

  But beyond all this, he’s worried about this young woman. There’s only one thing to do – go to Om Prakash and get the truth out of him. After all, if Vidyanath’s computer generated her image, and if Vidyanath isn’t a complete fraud, he would know something about her, about that time. It is a forlorn hope, but it’s all he has.

  He takes the Metro on his way back. The train snakes its way under the city through the still-new tunnels, past brightly lit stations where crowds surge in and out and small boys peddle chai and soft drinks. At one of these stops, he sees the apparitions of people, their faces clammy and pale, clad in rags; he smells the stench of unwashed bodies too long out of the sun. They are coming out of the cement floor of the platform, as though from the bowels of the earth. He’s seen them many times before; he knows they are from some future he’d rather not think about. But now it occurs to him with the suddenness of a blow that they are from the blind girl’s future. Lower Delhi – Neechi Dilli – that is what this must be: a city of the poor, the outcast, the criminal, in the still-to-be-carved tunnels underneath the Delhi that he knows. He thinks of the Metro, fallen into disuse in that distant future, its tunnels abandoned to the dispossessed, and the city above a delight of gardens and gracious buildings, and tall spires reaching through the clouds. He has seen that once, he remembers. The Immaculate City, the blind girl called it.

  By the time he gets to Vidyanath’s shop, it is late afternoon, and the little square is filling with long shadows. At the bus stop where he disembarks, there is a young woman sitting, reading something. She looks vaguely familiar; she glances quickly at him but he notices her only peripherally.

  He bursts into the room. Om Prakash is reading a magazine, which he sets down in surprise. A bee crawls out of his ear and flies up in a wide circle to the hive on the window. Aseem hardly notices.

  “Where’s that fellow, Vidyanath?”

  Om Prakash looks mildly alarmed.

  “My employer is not here, sir.”

  “Look, Om Prakash, something has happened, something serious. I met the young woman of the printout. But she’s from the future. I need to go back and find her. You must get Vidyanath for me. If his computer made the image of her, he must know how I can reach her.”

  Om Prakash shakes his head sadly.

  “Panditji speaks only through the computer.” He looks at the beehive, then at Aseem. “Panditji cannot control the future, you know that. He can only tell you your purpose. Why you are important.”

  “But I made a mistake! I didn’t realize she was from another time. I told her something and she disappeared before I could do anything. She could be in danger! It is a terrible future, Om Prakash. There is a city below the city where the poor live. And above the ground there is clean air and tall minars and udan khatolas that fly between worlds. No dirt or beggars or poor people. Like when the foreign vips come to town and the policemen chase people like me out of the main roads. But Neechi Dilli is like a prison, I’m sure of it. They can’t see the sun.”

  Om Prakash throws his hands in the air.

  “What can I say, Sahib?”

  Aseem goes around the table and takes Om Prakash by the shoulders.

  “Tell me, Om Prakash, am I nothing but a strand in a web? Do I have a choice in what I do, or am I simply repeating lines written by someone else?”

  “You can choose to break my bones, sir, and nobody can stop you. You can choose to jump into the Yamuna. Whatever you do affects the world in some small way. Sometimes the effect remains small, sometimes it grows and grows like a pipal tree. Causality as we call it is only a first-order effect. Second-order causal loops jump from time to time, as in your visions, sir. The future, Panditji says, is neither determined nor undetermined.”

  Aseem releases the fellow. His head hurts and he is very tired, and Om Prakash makes no more sense than usual. He feels emptied of hope. As he leaves he turns to ask Om Prakash one more question.

  “Tell me, Om Prakash, this Pandit Vidyanath, if he exists – what is his agenda? What is he trying to accomplish? Who is he working for?”

  “Pandit Vidyanath works for the city, as you know. Otherwise he works only for himself.”

  He goes out into the warm evening. He walks toward the bus stop. Over the chatter of people and the car horns on the street and the barking of pariah dogs, he can hear the distant buzzing of bees.

  At the bus stop, the half-familiar young woman is still sitting, studying a computer printout in the inadequate light of the street lamp. She looks at him quickly, as though she wants to talk, but thinks better of it. He sits on the cement bench in a daze. Three years of anticipation, all for nothing. He should write down the last story and throw away his notebook.

  Mechanically, he takes the notebook out and begins to wr
ite.

  She clears her throat. Evidently she is not used to speaking to strange men. Her clothes and manner tell him she’s from a respectable middle-class family. And then he remembers the girl he pushed away from a bus near Nai Sarak.

  She’s holding the page out to him.

  “Can you make any sense of that?”

  The printout is even more indistinct than his. He turns the paper around, frowns at it, and hands it back to her.

  “Sorry, I don’t see anything.”

  She says: “You could interpret the image as a crystal of unusual structure, or a city skyline with tall towers. Who knows? Considering that I’m studying biochemistry and my father really wants me to be an architect with his firm, it isn’t surprising that I see those things in it. Amusing, really.”

  She laughs. He makes what he hopes is a polite noise.

  “I don’t know. I think the charming and foolish Om Prakash is a bit of a fraud. And you were wrong about me, by the way. I wasn’t trying to . . . to kill myself that day.”

  She’s sounding defensive now. He knows he was not mistaken about what he saw in her eyes. If it wasn’t then, it would have been some other time – and she knows this.

  “Still, I came here on an impulse,” she says in a rush, “and I’ve been staring at this thing and thinking about my life. I’ve already made a few decisions about my future.”

  A bus comes lurching to a stop. She looks at it, then at him, and hesitates. He knows she wants to talk, but he keeps scratching away in his notebook. At the last moment before the bus pulls away, she swings her bag over her shoulder, waves at him, and climbs aboard. The look he had first noticed in her eyes has gone, for the moment. Today, she’s a different person.

  He finishes writing in his notebook, and with a sense of inevitability that feels strangely right, he catches a bus that will take him across one of the bridges that span the Yamuna.

  * * *

  At the bridge, he leans against the concrete wall looking into the dark water. This is one of his familiar haunts; how many people has he saved on this bridge? The pipal tree sapling still grows in a crack in the cement – the municipality keeps uprooting it, but it is buried too deep to die completely. Behind him there are cars and lights and the sound of horns, the jangle of bicycle bells. He sets his notebook down on top of the wall, wishing he had given it to someone, like that girl at the bus stop. He can’t make himself throw it away. A peculiar lassitude, a detachment, has taken hold of him and he can think and act only in slow motion.

  He’s preparing to climb on to the wall of the bridge, his hands clammy and slipping on the concrete, when he hears somebody behind him say, “Wait!” He turns. It is like looking into a distorting mirror. The man is hollow-cheeked, with a few days’ stubble on his chin, and the untidy thatch of hair has thinned and is streaked with silver. He holds a bunch of cards in his hand. A welt mars one cheek, and his left sleeve is torn and stained with something rust-coloured. His eyes are leopard’s eyes, burning with a dreadful urgency. “Aseem,” says the stranger who is not a stranger, panting as though he has been running, his voice breaking a little. “Don’t . . .” He is already starting to fade. Aseem reaches out a hand and meets nothing but air. A million questions rise in his head, but before he can speak the image is gone.

  Aseem’s first impulse is a defiant one. What if he were to jump into the river now – what would that do to the future, to causality? It would be his way of bowing out of the game that the city’s been playing with him, of saying: I’ve had enough of your tricks. But the impulse dies. He thinks instead about Om Prakash’s second-order causal loops, of sunset over the Red Fort, and the twisting alleyways of the old city, and death sleeping under the eyelids of the citizenry. He sits down slowly on the dusty sidewalk. He covers his face with his hands; his shoulders shake.

  After a long while he stands up. The road before him can take him anywhere, to the faded colonnades and bright bustle of Connaught Place, to the hush of public parks, with their abandoned cricket balls and silent swings, to old government housing settlements where, amid sleeping bungalows, ancient trees hold court before somnolent congresses of cows. The dusty bylanes and broad avenues and crumbling monuments of Delhi lie before him, the noisy, lurid marketplaces, the high-tech glass towers, the glitzy enclaves with their citadels of the rich, the boot-boys and beggars at street corners . . . He has just to take a step and the city will swallow him up, receive him the way a river receives the dead. He is a corpuscle in its veins, blessed or cursed to live and die within it, seeing his purpose now and then, but never fully.

  Staring unseeingly into the bright clamor of the highway, he has a wild idea that, he realizes, has been bubbling under the surface of his consciousness for a while. He recalls a picture he saw once in a book when he was a boy: a satellite image of Asia at night. On the dark bulge of the globe there were knots of light; like luminous fungi, he had thought at the time, stretching tentacles into the dark. He wonders whether complexity and vastness are sufficient conditions for a slow awakening, a coming-to-consciousness. He thinks about Om Prakash, his foolish grin and waggling head, and his strange intimacy with the bees. Will Om Prakash tell him who Pandit Vishwanath really is, and what it means to “work for the city?” He thinks not. What he must do, he sees at last, is what he has been doing all along: look out for his own kind, the poor and the desperate, and those who walk with death in their eyes. The city’s needs are alien, unfathomable. It is an entity in its own right, expanding every day, swallowing the surrounding countryside, crossing the Yamuna which was once its boundary, spawning satellite children, infant towns that it will ultimately devour. Now it is burrowing into the earth, and even later it will reach long fingers towards the stars.

  What he needs most at this time is someone he can talk to about all this, someone who will take his crazy ideas seriously. There was the girl at the bus stop, the one he had rescued in Nai Sarak. Om Prakash will have her address. She wanted to talk; perhaps she will listen as well. He remembers the printout she had shown him and wonders if her future has something to do with the Delhi-to-come, the city that intrigues and terrifies him: the Delhi of udan-khatolas, the “ships that fly between worlds,” of starved and forgotten people in the catacombs underneath. He wishes he could have asked his future self more questions. He is afraid because it is likely (but not certain, it is never that simple) that some kind of violence awaits him, not just the violence of privation, but a struggle that looms indistinctly ahead, that will cut his cheek and injure his arm, and do untold things to his soul. But for now there is nothing he can do, caught as he is in his own timestream. He picks up his notebook. It feels strangely heavy in his hands. Rubbing sticky tears out of his eyes, he staggers slowly into the night.

  THE TRIBES OF BELA

  Albert E. Cowdrey

  Albert E. Cowdrey quit a government job to try his hand at writing. So far, he’s appeared almost exclusively in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, where he’s published a handful of well-received stories over the last few years, most of them supernatural horror, many of them taking place in a New Orleans haunted by demons and dark magic. In 2000, he took a sudden unexpected turn away from horror and into science fiction, producing two of the year’s best science fiction novellas, “Crux” (which appeared in our Eighteenth Annual Collection) and its sequel “Mosh,” which were expanded in 2004 into a novel called Crux. Although most of Cowdrey’s output remains fantasy, he continues to turn his hand occasionally to science fiction as well, with results that make readers wish he’d do it more often, as in the tense and exciting tale that follows, a pure-quill old-fashioned science fiction adventure story that takes us to a troubled alien world where the natives are considerably more than restless . . .

  Cowdrey lives in New Orleans, although whether his New Orleans is as scary as the one in his fantasy stories is probably something that it’s better not to ask.

  Documents assembled by the Honorable Committee Investigating the Tr
agedy on Planet Bela, and JUDGMENT Thereupon.

  ITEM (1)

  Extracts from the Notebook of

  Kohn, Robert Rogers, Colonel, Security Forces

  I feel like I’m diving, not landing.

  Bucking headwinds, the freighter’s shuttle fights wind and rain until we drop out of the overcast over a blue-black sea. We’re heading for a small rocky headland that juts out of a dim coastline.

  The green duroplast shuttleport looks like a large fake emerald set in a broken ring of foam. The retros sear the pad, and clouds of steam boil up. As the sole passenger, I’m allowed to exit the ship before its rusty handling bots begin loading. An army of shiny ingots – gold, titanium, metals I don’t have a name for – stands to attention, scoured by rain, awaiting the outward journey.

  Two moronic guards (male and female) named Vizbee and Smelt retrieve my luggage under the baleful eye of Julia Mack, Captain, Security. My local counterpart salutes and I say falsely that I’m glad to be here. Smelt comments, “You may be glad now, but you won’t be for long.”

  Vizbee adds, “Oughta give this goddamn swamp back to the Arkies.”

  “Quiet!” trumpets Captain Mack, and without further comment, the guards stow my things in a little flyer waiting in a hangar with airfoils retracted. Climbing in, I feel the four or five extra kilos I weigh here – also taste a fizzy, champagne-like something in the air. Maybe the extra oxygen will help me carry the extra weight. Or maybe just make me drunk.

  Welcome to Planet Bela, old man.

  We’re barreling toward Main Base over fog-shrouded cliffs, through a squall blowing in from the ocean. Mack thinks it’s all beautiful.