The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “I’m coming!” I said, and in that moment there was no fear in my heart.

  He would not wait but would meet me halfway. I don’t know what means he employed to travel from wherever he was, but early that morning I stepped off the train at a tiny station where this train normally did not stop. He must have arranged it by tinkering with the engine driver’s mind. The thought made me shudder. I knew this was the place.

  The brick station platform was edged with lush bougainvillea bushes with red flowers. Apart from the blanket-wrapped people asleep on the platform in the early morning stillness and a small band of crows raiding the garbage, there was nobody. In the field by the station, men, young and old, squatted at their ablutions, their water pots agleam in the early sun. They watched the train go by and did their business without embarrassment. I walked through the nearly empty station house, where I smelled tea brewing. Lata Mangeshkar was singing a bhajan on the radio. I came out into the narrow lanes of a small town.

  He was in a ramshackle hotel room not far from the station. Our minds met as I climbed the stairs. I didn’t have to knock; he opened the door and let me in. He was in the same form as when I’d seen him last: a wiry Indian man who seemed larger than he was. The room was dingy, with a dressing table and a tarnished mirror in an ornate brass frame. A single, sagging bed was covered with a blue, patterned sheet, and paan stains showed through the whitewashed walls. A calendar with a buxom movie star hung on the wall by the window. I could see the street below, already crowded with bicycles, and a few cars lurching behind them, honking. The air was full of the sounds of bicycle bells.

  Rahul Moghe did not touch me but bade me sit on the only chair in the room.

  How can I describe that meeting? Here was the being I had feared and loathed for so many years of my life, who had killed innocent people, had done to death the one human being who had loved me and cared for me: Janani. And yet … he was my own kind. Between our minds there were no barriers. With him I could begin to learn the lexicon of my lost language.

  I touched his mind tentatively; I could have lost myself exploring its dizzying contours. But when the whole mass shifted and loomed over me like a great blue whale turning, I withdrew in panic.

  “I forgot,” he said, and his voice startled me in the room. “Last time. You weren’t used to how we communicate. I should have given you more time.”

  The questions and challenges I had for him dried on my tongue. It took me some time to speak. All the while his eyes looked hungrily at me. Leopard’s eyes, burning in that gold-brown face.

  “I want to know … I need to know more about what I … what we are,” I said. “Why we are here. Why you’ve done what you’ve done.”

  “Let me touch you,” he said. “Not mind-to-mind, if that frightens you still, but I can’t explain things very well by speech alone. I must have contact.”

  I put my hand on his arm. He shivered, and it seemed to me that his arm would change, that he would change form any moment, but he didn’t.

  “You don’t know how long I searched for you,” he said. “I went all over the world … . Then it came to me that I would have to wait for you to come home to me. All these years I have been waiting.”

  I don’t know what I had expected of this meeting, but the almost anticlimactic quietness of it was something I had not anticipated.

  “Let me tell you about our people,” he said. “According to the lore, when our species was still young, yet old enough to go out among the stars, we colonized several worlds, this one among them. Then our own world fell into an age of darkness and ignorance. Instead of letting each other meld and fuse and thereby achieve greater harmony, we put up barriers. We fought. We lost ourselves and our history. You must understand that a species such as ours does not record data on stone—we have no need of it. When we die, we simply rejoin the formless substrate that holds all our memories. New ones are born from that substrate with bits and pieces of the old knowledge. When we meld with another, we recover it for all of ourselves.

  “When I was young we had recovered some fragments, enough to know how to build ships again to navigate the seas of the sky. But there had been no contact between us and the colonized worlds for eons. Our history would not be complete until the colonizers came home and mingled with us. So some of us set out. I landed on this planet and began my search for our kind.”

  I could feel his mind straining to speak its own language, to tell me mind-to-mind what those first years had been like. The escape from the first burning. The destruction of the spaceship. The endless wanderings from continent to continent to find the colonizers. And then, a stupendous discovery.

  “The first wave of colonizers had taken over the native species as we have done on our own and other worlds,” he said. “It is a form of perspective-borrowing, where you get to see from the point of view of the animal what the universe looks like to it. But the colonizers had gone a step further. They had, in fact, joined with the mindshapes of the natives—turned native, in a manner of speaking, so that they no longer remembered who they were.

  “Have you ever wondered why you found it so easy to get into the minds of the animals here? The humans, more than any other species? It is because at some level the colonizers still remember their old language. Why do you think the average human is such a messy mix of contradictory emotions? Why do you think they feel alienated, not only from each other but from their own selves?”

  He fell silent.

  “But why do you destroy the humans, then,” I asked, “if part of them is like us?”

  The mountain ranges of his mind quivered, loomed large over me.

  “Why? Why? You can ask that?”

  He clutched my hand and pulled me to the bed. His hand burned as though with fever. He put his face close to mine. His eyes were empty sockets in which danced a universe of stars.

  After a while he could speak again.

  “When I made my discovery I realized I had to free our people, the first colonizers, from their bondage to this species. I could not go home; my spaceship had been destroyed. If another of our kind came to this planet we could return on their ship, or we could put our minds together and send forth a beacon into space, a message calling for help.

  “But that woman—that viper—destroyed the few who came. So I realized that there was another way.

  “If I could do the right kind of mind-weave between human minds, I could project a message into space, a weak one, but enough that it could be picked up. But for that I need your help. I have not succeeded because I need another to hold the structure. It will be the largest structure ever built, at least a hundred thousand human minds … .”

  It was like making waves on a string, I realized. You need a person at each end.

  “I think,” he resumed, “that this great melding of minds will free the original colonizers from their current state. They will realize who they really are. They will leave with us when the ship comes. Even if they cannot take corporeal form, we can find some way to take them with us. To go home …”

  His mindscape convulsed when he said the word “home.” All these decades he had experienced the utter loneliness of the foreigner whose language nobody knows.

  “I haven’t melded with a mind for years,” he said. “They left enough of you that I could at least get a taste of what it used to be like. You know, among our species, when we mate, nothing is hidden. We know each other as truly as it is possible to know another being. And then, when we have tired of the world and need rest, we sink into formlessness, to rise again as another consciousness.

  “How inadequate this language is! Come, now, let me show you in the way that you will truly understand. I cannot tell you what it is like … to actually be there.”

  We leaned toward each other. I could not help it. I suppose I had made the decision already that I would remain with him, two of a kind, marooned on this world. Perhaps I had hopes of ultimately being able to stop him from wreaking havoc on humankind.
I don’t know. All I wanted at that moment was to know again what it meant to meet mind-to-mind with my own species.

  How can I explain that need? I was trapped in this male, human, unchanging body; only with my mind meeting his could I have the freedom to transcend these boundaries. To taste all the thirty-four states and more, to soar above the barriers that humans make between each other, and between humankind and all else. To know another being in a way that surpasses ordinary intimacy. My human fears dissipated; my ghost self appeared in my mind, beckoning.

  Our attention was on each other, so it startled us both when there was a thunderous knocking at the door and shouting outside. We had already drawn together; the top of his pale yellow shirt was unbuttoned and I could smell, incongruously, cologne on his skin. In that moment as we sprang apart, I saw what hung from his neck on a black thread.

  It was a human finger. It looked fresh; somehow the nail gleamed pinkly, which seemed unnatural, because it must have hung on his neck these many years, a trophy. It had once graced Janani’s hand. I was sure of that.

  “Fire!” shouted the man at the door. He left us and ran to the next door, shouting. Downstairs we could hear more yells, confusion. I smelled smoke.

  Rahul Moghe stared fiercely at me.

  “Have you led those vipers to me? Is this a betrayal, after all?”

  “No!” I said. “Let’s get out quickly. I don’t know, it may just be an ordinary fire.”

  But even as I said it I knew that it wasn’t so. I had been followed. That man on the train … his initials, A.R. Like the signature on the note that Rinu had showed me, those years ago in the Himalayas.

  They must have been keeping track of me for a long time.

  The lower part of the building was in flames. Men were leading cattle out from one of the rooms, which had apparently been used as a barn. Bits of straw floated in the smoke. A crowd of passersby had already collected; some were hauling buckets of water.

  Rahul Moghe and I pushed through the crowds. The streets were full of people, bicycles, cattle, and noise. Like him, I wanted to find a quiet place where we could be together. The knowledge of what the string around his neck held throbbed in my consciousness.

  We found an empty field behind a house that was being constructed. At this time house and field were both deserted. Great piles of red brick lay in rectangular stacks around us. There was some kind of storage shed in the field, with a massive padlock on its wooden door. We stopped in front of it and looked at each other. His mind quivered with hunger. I nodded.

  He put his finger into the padlock keyhole, thinning it into the right shape, and the lock clicked open. We went into the darkness of the hut, which was lit only by a narrow slit of a window. Inside were dusty bags of cement. I sensed a rat mind as the creature slithered away between the bags.

  What I had seen, what I hadn’t told him, was that a man had slipped behind us as we left the crowds outside the hotel. One man, maybe two. The interesting thing was that they were both blanks. I could not sense their minds, nor could Rahul Moghe.

  That finger. That is what stopped me from warning him.

  I thought to myself: I will pull him out of the fire before they completely destroy his mind. He will be like me, then, a creature with whom I can meld my own mind, but who will no longer be able to destroy humankind. After all, this world isn’t so bad; I don’t even remember the other one. We’ll be marooned together … .

  He must have sensed some change in my mindscape; I think it was only his need of me that stopped him from probing too deeply. Perhaps he thought only that I was afraid.

  “I will be careful with you,” he told me, as he reached toward me. I felt myself go under as the great waves of his loneliness and longing washed over me. Then there I was, sailing with him as though on the waves of a vast sea. He was beginning to change shape, very slowly out of consideration for me.

  I opened my mouth to speak, to warn him after all, maybe, but he closed it with his own. Limbs emerged from his trunk, embracing my own body, fitting against me like no human ever could, making allowance for the rigidity of my form. How trapped I felt then, in my human, unchangeable body!

  Outside, there was a muffled explosion; I saw that the thatched roof over our heads was on fire. The walls of the hut were mud and straw. People—the blanks; I don’t know how many there were—were battering the walls down. A flaring torch fell through the slit window.

  And still, for a moment, he held me, our minds and bodies locked in the closest embrace I have ever experienced. Then it came to him that we were trapped.

  “Help me!” I cried. Part of the roof had fallen in—fortunately not the part directly above our heads—and I could see sky through the smoke. I pulled him to this spot. We opened a bag of cement and threw it on the flames, but still they smoldered around us. Brands of burning wood were being thrown through the gap in the roof. We were choking, coughing. I thought to myself, This is how I will die, with him.

  “Change form!” I cried. “Change into a bird—fly away! They are not interested in me. Go!”

  “It is too late,” he said hoarsely. “Besides, I will not leave you.” We were both kneeling on the dirt floor, gasping for breath. He put his arms around me, and again I felt the great, terrible magnificence of his mind surround my own. In my arms he changed form, swiftly, dizzily: he was a horned ape, a squat, treelike monster, a giant, ameboid, tentacled beast. I felt that great mindscape shudder as though a quake was ripping through it; I saw the glory of structure and form coming apart. His face and body changed; in my arms he was human again, but he felt different, rigid, unchangeable. I wanted to pull him out of the fire before his old self died, as Janani had done for me. I called Janani’s name through my charred throat, but all around me was a wall of fire.

  I saw her then, Janani, her face incongruously suspended in the fire as though she were part of it, her dark brown hands reaching out for me through the ochre flames. The left hand was missing an index finger.

  When I came to, I was lying on the floor in a room. Afternoon light poured in. There was a man lying next to me, his breath warm against my neck. My arms hurt; now I saw that they were clasped tightly around the man.

  A face hung over me; the person was gently trying to disengage my hands. As he did so, the man I had been holding rolled over onto his back, apparently unconscious.

  It was Rahul Moghe in his permanent form. Only he looked exactly like me.

  “He imprinted on you,” a voice said. I saw that there were other people in the room; the one who was speaking now was my train companion, A.R. He wasn’t a blank, but the others were.

  “Janani,” I croaked. My throat felt burnt. There were tender spots all over my body. “Where’s Janani?”

  A.R. frowned. “Janani has been dead for years,” he said. “That fellow—Rahul Moghe—killed her. I thought you knew.”

  “But,” I began, then gave up.

  Someone said “Hush; be still.” The man was a doctor; he was leaning over me, applying some kind of ointment. Soothing my burns.

  “You suffered smoke inhalation and some pretty bad burns,” he said. “But you’ll be all right. We dare not take you to a hospital lest questions be asked.”

  I turned my head, not without pain, to indicate Rahul Moghe. Seeing his face was a shock all over again. I could have been looking into a mirror.

  “What about him?”

  “He’s going to be fine,” the doctor said. “He’s harmless now.”

  He was harmless all right. That great mindscape was gone, and in its place … a shadow. Nothing left but a ghost. After all this, I had not saved him; I had not pulled him out in time.

  He stirred, opened his eyes. They were as vacant as an idiot child’s. A thin line of drool trickled down from one corner of his lips.

  “Rahul?” I said, and began to weep.

  Later they told me that there must always be a human holding the alien in their grasp when the fire is lit, so that the alien would t
ake up the form of that person. In my own burning the person had been a young friend of Janani’s, part of the network. He had later been killed by Rahul Moghe.

  “How did you know where I was?” I asked my captors. I think it was the second day of my recovery. I lay on a bed, my body covered with bandages. Rahul Moghe drooped in a chair in a corner, looking at nothing.

  “We’ve been … keeping track of you,” said the man called A.R.

  A terrible thought occurred to me.

  “Not Binodini?”

  “Not Binodini,” he said, but I could not tell whether he was, with gentle mockery, simply repeating my words, or whether he meant that she had nothing to do with this. Was it a coincidence that she had been the one to persuade me to look for Rahul Moghe? She had connections to groups that kept track of UFO sightings. If she was part of the network, she would know that the only way they would find him would be through me.

  I don’t know that I’ll ever know.

  Rahul Moghe is at a special home for the retarded. I go to see him nearly every month. When he sees me, something like recognition comes into his eyes. Sometimes he laughs; sometimes he sets up a terrible keening, like a child in pain. He can speak a few words of Hindi, use the bathroom, brush his teeth, but he cannot read. He likes it when I tell him stories, though. I tell him about other worlds and their wonders, and sometimes it almost seems to me that he is remembering.

  I still don’t know if Janani is alive. A.R. swore to me that she died at Rahul Moghe’s hands all those years ago, but my memory of her face in the fire, her hands with that missing finger, is so vivid that I have trouble believing she is gone. She may think it best to stay out of my life, knowing what she’s done, what I’ve been through. If we meet someday I have no idea what I’ll say to her.

  I’ve often thought about what Rahul Moghe told me that fateful morning in the hotel room: that people of our own kind came to live in and become part of human minds. I’ve read about that curious organelle, the mitochondrion that inhabits cells. It was once an independent entity, a kind of bacterium, but at some point in human evolutionary history it ceased to become an invader and instead became an essential part of something larger. If you could offer a mitochondrion its freedom, would it take it?