The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  “What would happen to the station?” By this time Akuin was sitting up and looking at Thev with horror. This wasn’t a pleasant situation that Thev was describing. But Thev’s voice was full of interest and pleasure. What Thev was enjoying, of course, was his own cleverness. In addition, it’s possible that he saw the situation as one of the many fine jokes with which the Goddess has filled her universe. A pious man will always enjoy the Great Mother’s tricks.

  “It depends on the size of the collapse,” Thev said. “If it takes the entire region out, the station will be destroyed. But if it’s the right size, and happens at the right distance, we’ll be able to observe the process.”

  Akuin was getting a headache, either from the conversation or his lover’s ugly things, which still filled the room and continued to change in disturbing ways. He mentioned the headache. Thev stopped the recording. The garden remained, but everything in it was motionless.

  Much better! Akuin lay back. The mirror above him reflected his own dark body. On one side of him was a funnel made of bright red lines. It appeared to be dissolving and pouring itself down itself, though nothing moved now; and the center of the funnel was empty.

  On the other side of him was a blue sphere, which had apparently stopped in the middle of turning itself into something full of many sharp angles. Both the angles and the sphere’s smooth surface were visible. Akuin closed his eyes.

  Thev kept talking. More research was needed. He’d written a proposal. “But you know the funding situation. If an idea can’t be turned into a weapon at once, the frontmen aren’t interested; and I can’t see any obvious way to do harm with my ideas. Maybe some day we’ll be able to use strangeness as a weapon, but not soon.”

  Thev must be getting tired. His conversation was beginning to wander. So much was uncertain. So many things might happen. If the station wasn’t swallowed, it might still be destroyed by the event. “I don’t think this process of collapse will be entirely quiet and peaceful.” Or, if the station survived, and the men inside were alive, they might find that they’d lost their Heligian gate.*

  “We’d be trapped,” Akuin said. No one had ever warned him to beware of sex with physicists. Maybe they should have. It would be easier to have a lover who thought about more trivial problems.

  “We could send information home,” Thev answered in an encouraging tone. “Only at the speed of light. But that would be sufficient. It would take less than five years for a message to reach the nearest working gate. Surely the frontmen would post a ship there, after our gate vanished.”

  “What is most likely to happen?” Akuin asked.

  “The station will be destroyed.”

  “Soon?”

  “I don’t know,” Thev said. “Some of the work done here suggests the space in this region is badly strained already; and it’s possible that our presence is making things worse.”

  “How?” Akuin asked.

  “Through the coming and going of star ships. They do have an effect, though not one that matters in ordinary situations. And there is at least one experiment which may be acting like roots pushing through a crack in limestone, or may be like a slight twist of the cheese.” Thev smiled briefly. “The experiment is continuing, though I’ve mentioned that it may cause trouble. The men running it don’t believe the risk is significant.”

  “Aren’t you worried?” Akuin asked.

  “What can I do, except put my ideas out in front? Maybe I’m wrong. I have sent my theory, and recordings of my models, to the Helig Institute. If I die here, I will become famous. If I don’t die here, if this region of space does not collapse, then I’ll become famous later for something else. One cannot live in fear of thoughts, Akuin.”

  That was the end of the conversation. Akuin found he couldn’t get Thev’s ideas out of his mind. They haunted him: the collapsing grove, the cheese eaten out by bugs, the garden of ugly things.

  Bad enough to think of living for years in the station. But to think of dying here! How could he feel the same affection for Thev? A man who came up with such ideas and models!

  Gradually the two lovers drew apart. Thev accepted this with his usual calm good sense. Nothing pushed him back for long. He always recovered and went forward. Soon he found a lover among the physicists: not a thinker, but a hands-on builder, who said that Thev’s models were likely to prove useful, though he didn’t believe the station was in danger.

  “You theoreticians love terrifying ideas! The Goddess may be sloppy in her details. We know she is, from looking around. But the basic structure of her universe is solid. Space doesn’t fall to pieces like a bridge with bad mortar. It lasts! And will outlast everything!”

  As for Akuin, he took a series of sexual partners. All were casual. This didn’t especially bother him. Some men must have a true love, a companion for life. He wasn’t such a man. Sex was fine. So was friendship. But his real love – the center of his life – was plants.

  Another year passed. Once again he traveled home. His grandmother had died suddenly, shortly after his previous trip. Now it was time to put her ashes in the ground and carve her name on the monument for Atkwa women.

  When he reached his home country, it was spring. In his grandmother’s garden flowers bloomed, attracting early bugs. The house was full of female relatives, busy with details of the coming ceremony.

  There was nothing for Akuin to do, so he went hiking. South and west of the house were hills, not high, but made impressive by huge outcrop-pings of igneous rock. No limestone here, eroding easily! His country had bones of granite! An ikun from home, he came to his favorite spot for looking into the distance.* Up he climbed, until he was atop the great bald knob. Now he could see the folded hills, covered with pale blue foliage. They stretched in every direction. Here and there were patches of color: yellow, light orange or lavender, flowering shrubs and trees.

  All at once, he realized he had reached the limit of his endurance. He could not bear to leave this place again. He would not return to space.

  Why did this happen? How can any man turn away from duty? His grandmother, the most formidable member of his family, was dead. He’d lost his lover. His mentor had turned out to be a pervert, attracted to children. The garden in the station was not an adequate substitute for the country here, extending around him in every direction under a cloudless sky.

  Always, in the station, he was aware of the space outside: dark, cold, airless, hostile to life. If Thev was right, the emptiness outside the station was not even reliable. It might collapse at any moment, becoming something worse.

  Here he stood on granite.

  By the time he returned to his grandmother’s house, he was already making plans. His female relatives continued to be busy, his mother especially. She would be the new matriarch. Akuin gathered supplies, sneaking them out of storerooms and hiding them in a forest. Tools. Clothing. A rifle and ammunition. A hunting bow and arrows. Medical supplies. Plenty of seeds. A computer full of information.

  By the time his grandmother was underground, he was ready. There was a final ceremony: cutting his grandmother’s name in the stone which memorialized the family’s dead women. When that was over, his mother bid him farewell. A cousin took him to the train station. He climbed on board, climbing out the far side and ducking behind a bush. The train pulled away. His cousin returned to her car. Akuin took off for the forest and his hidden supplies.

  He reached them without trouble. With luck, it would be several days before his family realized that he had vanished: time enough to get into the high mountains, the wilderness. He was strong, determined, and not afraid of anything in his homeland. Pack on back, he set off.

  There’s no reason to tell his life in detail from this point on. The important thing had happened. Akuin had decided to turn away from loyalty and obligation. Now, he lived for himself rather than his family or his species. This is something humans do, if the stories we hear are true. This is why their home planet is full of violence and has far too many i
nhabitants, produced not by careful breeding contracts, but random acts of heterosexuality.

  He found a valley high in the mountains, away from all trails with a hard-to-find entrance. There he built a hut and established his garden. The first year was difficult. So was the second. But he persisted. At times he was lonely. Not often. He’d always been comfortable with solitude. The things around him – sunlight, rain, wind, his garden, the mountains – were a constant source of joy.

  In the third year he built a solid cabin. Having done this, he began to wonder what was happening in the house where he’d grown up. He waited till harvest was over, and his cabin full of food. Then he went home.

  He couldn’t arrive openly, of course. He was a criminal now, and the women of his family had always been law-abiding and respectful of tradition. Instead, he lurked in the forest shadow and crept close after dark, peering in windows. There his family was, the same as always. Only he had changed. For a while he felt regret. Then he remembered the station, and Gehazi Thev’s terrifying ideas. He’d made the right choice.

  The next fall he came down again. This time he did a little stealing. There were tools he needed, and he could always use more seeds.

  The fifth year of his exile, he decided to visit the library in his grandmother’s house, which was held by his mother now. He crept in after midnight, when the house was entirely dark, and made his way without trouble to the room. Some of the houses in Atkwa were old. Their libraries were full of actual books, ancient cherished objects. This house had been built a century before. There were a few books, brought from other places, but most of the glass-fronted cabinets held modern recordings. When his electric torch played over them, they glittered like so many jewels: garnet-red novels, poetry like peridots, topaz-yellow plays. The music was shades of blue. What a fool he’d been to take only nonfiction before! Quickly, he picked the recordings he wanted and copied them into his computer, then replaced the shining bits of silicon and metal in their proper resting places.

  When he was almost done, he heard a noise. Akuin turned and saw his mother, standing in the doorway.

  Hah! She reached out a hand. The ceiling light went on. Akuin stood ashamed, his hands full of music, like a jewel thief holding sapphires.

  His mother stepped into the room, closing the door behind her. “It was you who stole from us last fall.”

  He tilted his head in agreement.

  “I thought so, and I thought, ‘He’s alive.’ That idea brought me joy, Akuin, though it shouldn’t have. What’s wrong with you? Why was it so difficult for you to live like other men? When you came home the first time, your grandmother and I made plans. If your romance worked out, she wanted to ask the Gehazi for semen. A young man of so much promise! A family worth forming an alliance with! We thought – we hoped – you had overcome your oddness at last.”

  No words of explanation came to him. Instead, he said, “What?” and stopped. His voice sounded harsh. The tone was wrong. He was no longer used to speaking.

  “What am I going to do? Nothing. By now the neighboring families have forgotten about you. If I give you to the male police, it will bring our shame into daylight. People will know for certain that you ran from duty. Before, there was a possibility that something happened – an accident, a murder.”

  “You could tell me to die,” Akuin said in his new strange voice.

  “Would you kill yourself, if I asked you to?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “No,” his mother said. “I think not. Go back to your mountains. Every family has embarrassing secrets. You will be ours.”

  He set the music on a table. How it glittered!

  “Don’t come into the house again,” his mother added. “I’ll see that things are left in the far barn for you.”

  He opened his mouth to thank her.

  “Go.”

  Akuin left, carrying his computer.

  The next year he came home twice, though not to the greathouse. Instead he found his mother’s gifts in the far barn: tools, small boxes containing seeds, recordings of music, favorite pieces from when he was young, a letter full of family news.

  After this, there were no changes in his life for many years. Bit by bit, he expanded his garden and made his cabin more comfortable. Slowly he read his way through most of the great male plays, which are – as everyone knows – about honor and the making of difficult choices. The heroes, the men who must choose, usually die, as he should have. Or they sacrifice their happiness to obligation. Another thing he had failed to do.

  In addition, he read many of the plays written about women and their lives. These deal with endurance and compromise, which are not male virtues.

  Maybe he would have made a better woman, though it didn’t seem likely. Nothing about him seemed especially feminine. He certainly didn’t have his grandmother’s solidity. His mother was the same. Women like the mountains of Atkwa! Nothing ordinary could wear them down!

  Akuin’s mother died prematurely, when he was only forty. Coming down from the mountains through an early snow, he found the usual kind of supplies in the far barn, also a letter. It was from one of his female cousins, telling him the news. A sudden illness, that should not have killed a woman so healthy, not yet old. But it did! Life is full of these kinds of surprises, his cousin wrote in an elegant, flowing script, though Akuin was not thinking about calligraphy at the moment.

  He fell to his knees, chest heaving. The groans inside him would not come out. Beyond the barn’s open door, snow fell in thick soft flakes.

  The gifts would continue, his cousin wrote. She had promised his mother while the woman lay dying. This is not the kind of promise one breaks. Though I have to say, Akuin, that I do not approve of your behavior.

  “So, so,” Akuin said. He got up finally, walking into the snow. No chance the people in the house would see him through this whiteness. He lifted his head and hands, as if to catch something, though he didn’t know what. The life he should have had? The snow flakes melted when they touched his palms.

  More time passed. This is what the real world is like. Instead of the sudden important decisions that heroes must make in plays, everything solved in less than an ikun, real life is gradual.

  His cousin kept her promise. He continued to find gifts in the barn. For many years he saw no people, except at a distance. He always managed to avoid them.

  One summer morning when he was almost fifty, Akuin stepped out his cabin door and saw a monster in his garden. That was his first impression. The thing stood in brilliant sunlight. Akuin, coming out of his cabin’s dimness, could make out nothing except the creature’s shape: upright on two legs like a person, but far too thin and tall. A stick-person. A person made of bones. Like bones, the monster was pale.

  He stepped back into his cabin, picked up his rifle and waited, hoping the monster had not seen him. Maybe it would go away. He’d never had a problem with monsters before.

  The thing remained in the middle of Akuin’s vegetables. He saw it more clearly now. It had on clothing, pants and a red checked shirt. A head rose above the shirt. The face was hairless, the features like no hwarhath features he had ever seen: everything narrow and pushed together, as if someone had put hands on either side of the creature’s head and pressed, forcing the cheeks in, the nose out, the forehead up, the chin into a jutting bulge.

  “It’s a magnificent garden,” the creature said in Akuin’s own language.

  He’d been spotted. Akuin raised his rifle.

  A second voice said, “You are looking at a human. This one is friendly. Put the gun down.”

  Akuin glanced around, until he made out the second person, standing at the forest edge. He was short with steel-gray fur, dressed in hiking shorts and boots. A hwarhath male, beyond any question. But not a relative. Like the monster, he spoke with an accent that wasn’t local. In the case of this man, the accent was southern.

  “Believe me,” added the hwarhath in a quiet voice. “Neither one of us will d
o you any harm. We are here with the permission of the Atkwa, for recreational purposes.”

  “Hiking in the mountains,” said the monster in agreement.

  “Enemy,” Akuin said in the voice he almost never used. Hah! The word came out like a branch creaking in the wind!

  “The war has ended,” the hwarhath said. “We have peace with the humans.”

  This didn’t seem possible, but the news Akuin got from his cousin was all family news.

  “Put the gun down,” the hwarhath male repeated. “You really must not kill this human. He works for us. His rank is advancer one-in-back.” *

  Akuin had been a carrier. The monster far outranked him. It was definitely wrong to point a gun at a senior officer. He lowered the rifle.

  The hwarhath man said, “Good. Now, come out.”

  Slowly, Akuin moved into the sunlight. The monster remained motionless. So did the man at the edge of the forest.

  What next? Akuin stood with his rifle pointing down. He was making out more details now. There was a patch of hair, or possibly feathers, on top of the monster’s head. The patch was bone-white, like the hairless face. Even the monster’s eyes were white, though a dark spot floated in the middle of each eye. Was this a sign of disease? Could the monster be blind? No. Akuin had a clear sense that the thing was watching. The dark spots moved, flicking from him to the hwarhath male, then back again.

  “I think it would be easier to talk, if you put the gun down entirely,” the hwarhath said.

  A calm voice, low and even, but Akuin recognized the tone. This was authority speaking. He laid the rifle on the ground and straightened up, trying to remember the way he used to hold himself, back when he was a soldier.

  “Much better,” said the hwarhath. He walked forward and picked up the rifle, handing it to the monster.

  For a moment, Akuin was afraid. But the monster held the rifle properly, barrel pointed down. The oddly shaped hands did not reach for the trigger. The backs of the hands were pale and hairless. Was the creature the same all over? White and as hairless as a fish?