The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Emma Percy, Chalcedony was reasonably sure, would have saved the dog if she could have. And Kevin Michaels would have saved the kid. She held the remaining necklaces out. “Who’s going to protect the other children?”

  He stared, hands twisting before him. “You can’t climb.”

  “I can’t. You must do this for me. Find people to remember the stories. Find people to tell about my platoon. I won’t survive the winter.” Inspiration struck. “So I give you this quest, Sir Belvedere.”

  The chains hung flashing in the wintry light, the sea combed gray and tired behind them. “What kinda people?”

  “People who would help a child,” she said. “Or a wounded dog. People like a platoon should be.”

  He paused. He reached out, stroked the chains, let the beads rattle. He crooked both hands, and slid them into the necklaces up to the elbows, taking up her burden.

  The Accord

  KEITH BROOKE

  British writer and editor Keith Brooke is the founder and longtime editor of acclaimed Internet Web site Infinity Plus (he recently stepped down from this position to concentrate on his fiction-writing career). His novels include Keepers of the Peace, Expatria, Expatria Incorporated, Lord of Stone, and, most recently, Genetopia. He also writes as “Nick Gifford,” under which name he’s published Piggies, Flesh & Blood, Incubus, and Erased. As editor, he has produced the anthologies Infinity Plus One and Infinity Plus Two, edited with Nick Gevers; his most recent book is the anthology Infinity Plus, also edited with Nick Gevers. He’s had two chapbooks published, Head Shots, and, with Eric Brown, Parallax View.

  Here he takes us to an intricate far-future world, where races and peoples live in uneasy equilibrium, for a tale of love, obsession, and intrigue that just might throw everything out of whack.

  1. TISH GOLDENHAWK

  Tish Goldenhawk watched the gaudy Daguerran vessel slide into the harbour. If she had known then what she was soon to learn, she might even have settled for her humdrum existence, and even now she and Milton would be living a quiet life, seeing out their days before finally joining the Accord.

  But no, unblessed with foresight, Tish stood atop the silver cliffs of Penhellion and watched—no, marvelled—as the Lady Cecilia approached the crooked arm of the dock.

  The ship was unlike any she had seen. Far taller than it was long, it rose out of the mirrored waters like some kind of improbable island. Its flanks were made of polished wood and massed ranks of high arched windows, these revealing bodies within, faces pressed against glass as the grand touristas took in yet more of the sights of the worlds.

  He might have been among them. Another face staring out, its perfect features only distinguished by a crooked incisor. But no, he wouldn’t have been part of that gawping crowd. She would have known that if she had been blessed with foresight, if she had somehow known that there was a “he” of whom she could speculate just so at this moment.

  The ship, the Lady Cecilia … It towered unfeasibly. Only vastly advanced engineering could keep it from toppling this way or that. The thing defied gravity by its very existence. It sailed, a perfect vertical, its array of silken sails bulging picturesquely, its crew scrambling over the rigging like squirrels.

  At a distant screech, Tish tipped her head back and stared until she had picked out the tiny scimitar shapes of gliding pterosaurs. It was a clear day, and the world’s rings slashed a ribbon across the southern sky. Why did beauty make her sad?

  Tish breathed deep, and she knew she should be back at the Falling Droplet helping Milton and their fifteen-year-old son Druce behind the bar.

  And then she looked again at the golden, jewelled, bannered sailing ship now secured in the harbour and she felt an almighty welling of despair that this should be her lot in a world of such beauty and wonder.

  She walked back along a road cut into the face of the cliff. She was lucky. She lived in a beautiful place. She had a good husband, a fine son. She could want for nothing. Nobody starved or suffered in the worlds of the Diaspora, unless it was their choice to do so. People were born to different lots and hers was a good one.

  She was lucky, she told herself again. Blessed by the Accord.

  The Falling Droplet was set into the silver cliffs of Penhellion, its floor-to-ceiling windows giving breathtaking views out across the bay to where the coast hooked back on itself and the Grand Falls plunged more than a thousand metres into the sea.

  Rainbows played and flickered across the bay, an ever-changing colour masque put on by the interplay of the Falls and the sun. Pterosaurs and gulls and flying fish cut and swooped through the spray, while dolphins and merfolk arced and flipped in the waves.

  Tish was staring at the view, again, when the stranger approached the bar.

  “I … Erm …” He placed coins on the age-polished flutewood surface.

  Tish dragged her gaze away from the windows. She smiled at him, another anonymous grand tourista with perfect features, flawless skin, silky hair, a man who might as easily have been twenty as a century or more.

  He smiled back.

  The crooked tooth was a clever touch. A single tooth at the front, just a little angled so that there was a gap at the top, a slight overlap at the bottom. An imperfection in the perfect, a mote in the diamond.

  In that instant Tish Goldenhawk was transfixed, just as she had been by the sight of the Lady Cecilia earlier.

  She knew who he was, or rather, what he was, this stranger, this not quite perfect visitor. A made man should always have a flaw, if he were not to look, immediately, like a made man.

  “I … Erm …” she said, inadvertently repeating his own words from a moment before. “What’ll it be?”

  “I …” He gestured at one of the pumps.

  “Roly’s Scrumpy?” she said, reaching for a long glass. “You’d better be watching your head in the morning, if you’re not used to it. That stuff’s an ass: drink it full in the face and you’re fine, but as soon as you turn your back it’ll kick you.”

  She put the drink before him and helped herself to some of the coins he had spread out.

  “Been on Laverne for long?” she said, knowing the answer he would give. He had just landed, along with all these other touristas. Struggling with the dialect and the coins. These poor over-rich sods must be constantly disoriented, she realised, as they took their grand tours of the known. The poor lambs.

  He shook his head, smiled again. A day ago—even a few hours ago—he had probably been in a jungle, or in a seething metropolis, or deep in an undersea resort, ten, a hundred, a thousand light years away, along with others on the grand tour.

  Or that, at least, was probably what she was supposed to think. But Tish stuck with her hunch instead. She often constructed stories about the people she served in the Falling Droplet. The spies, the adulterers, the scag addicts, and the gender-confused. Sometimes she even turned out to be right, but usually she never confirmed her hunches one way or the other. This man was no grand tourista, although he might indeed be a new arrival.

  “You on the Lady Cecilia?” she asked him, hoping he would give himself away but knowing he wouldn’t.

  “I am,” he said, and then dipped his head to take a long draw of the cider. He glanced around. “Or at least,” he added, “I was …”

  “Tish?”

  Milton. He gestured. They had customers lined up at the bar. The Droplet had grown crowded and Tish had barely noticed. She moved away from the stranger, and served old Ruth with her usual Brewer’s Gold and nuts.

  Later, she noticed the three men as they came in from the darkening evening. They were strangers, too, as were many of this evening’s clientele, but they didn’t look like they were on any kind of grand tour. Their eyes scanned the crowd, and as one of the men fixed on her for the briefest of instants she felt skewered, scanned by some kind of machine.

  But no, these three were men, if clearly enhanced. They wore identical dark grey outfits, and now she saw what appeared to be weapons at t
heir belts.

  Tish had never seen a weapon before, unless you counted harpoons and ginny traps and the like. She had never seen men who looked like machines, although up in Daguerre she had seen machines like men and women.

  One of the men pointed, and the other two swivelled their heads in unison until all three looked in the same direction, motionless like a sandfisher poised to drop. The pointing man opened his hand and a beam of light shone from it across the crowded bar.

  Tish turned and saw a single man picked out by the beam, a long glass poised partway to his mouth, a mouth which revealed one imperfection in its otherwise flawless ranks of teeth.

  The stranger dropped his glass, ducked down, darted into the pack of bodies near to the bar.

  The three … they were no longer there by the door, they were across the room, standing where the stranger had been, motionless again, robot eyes surveying the crowd.

  Tish revised her earlier assessment. These men could not be mere humans—enhanced or not—and move as they did. They must be more than that. Other than that.

  The stranger … a tussle by the far door, and there he was, reaching for the handle.

  But the handle vanished, the door blurred, its boundaries softening, merging … and it was wall, not door. There was no exit there. There never had been.

  The stranger’s hand slid across a smooth surface, and he staggered. Why was he scratching at the wall like that?

  The three stood, watching, eyes locked on the stranger …

  … on nothing.

  The stranger had ducked into the crowd again.

  Tish leaned against the bar, her heart pounding, her mind swirling, her brain playing catch-up with the succession of images crammed into the merest of seconds that had passed since the door had opened and the three more-than-men had appeared.

  Another disturbance.

  The stranger.

  He had a wooden chair raised above his head.

  Beyond him, the sun was setting, heavy and swollen over the rainbowed water. The sky was cast in bands of the deepest of crimsons, a staggering gold, shading up to a high, dreamy purple. Laverne’s rings slashed darkly across this vivid sunset.

  The sky shattered. Crazed lines divided it up into an enormous, jagged jigsaw.

  Someone screamed, someone else shouted, someone else …

  Tish could no longer see the three men, and she could no longer see the stranger. She could see the chair embedded in one of the big windows, though, the glass crazed but still holding in its frame.

  Then she saw him, a silhouette against the fiery sky, diving.

  He hit the glass and for an instant it held and she thought he would end up embedded like the chair. And then the moment had passed and the glass shifted, bulged, and it, the chair, and the man tumbled out into the air.

  Someone screamed again, and the shouting continued, as the crowd shuffled back from the abyss.

  Tish looked away. They were half a kilometre up here, nothing but an awful lot of air between them and the rocks and waves below. No one could survive such a fall.

  She looked up again. The three were standing by the opening, peering out into the gloom. They were not talking, but she could tell from the poise of their bodies that they were somehow communicating. Was this a satisfactory outcome for them, or was it not?

  And then she thought, why would they do such a thing? What was it that had brought them here, on this evening, to do this?

  Why would they come here, to her normally peaceful cliff-hanging bar, and pursue this stranger in so startling and violent a manner?

  Why would anyone want to chase God, or even a very small fragment of God?

  Tish dropped in an air-shaft to Fandango Way, Penhellion’s main thoroughfare. The Way was cut into the base of the cliff, and ran from the docks to where it wound its way up the cliff face three kilometres east.

  She stepped out among the stalls of itinerant traders. She nodded and smiled and exchanged words here and there. She was not here to buy, and most of the traders knew that anyway: these same traders delivered supplies direct to the Falling Droplet. Tish had little need of market shopping.

  She carried a basket, though, and in the basket, beneath a checkered cloth, there was a crust of bread and a fistful of feathers from a quetzal.

  She crossed the road, dodging rickshaws and scooters. Lifting her feet daintily over the low wall, she stepped out onto the rocks.

  Down by the water’s edge, first of all she looked at the gentle chop of the waves, and then she craned her neck to peer upward, but she could not pick out the Falling Droplet’s frontage from all the others. So many dwellings and other establishments set into the cliff here. It was a very desirable place to live. She was lucky.

  She knelt on a big rounded boulder and wondered why she should be so sad also. She knew this feeling from the months after Druce was born. Back then she had been offered medication but had refused. Such feelings were part of the full spectrum of being and she had felt it her duty to endure them, so that one day she could carry them into the Accord: her contribution, a droplet of despair in the ocean of human experience.

  But this … this weight. She could not remember when it had started, and she suspected that there could be no such neat line: in some ways it had started in the mixing of genetic material used at her conception, while in others it might be quite recent.

  This melancholy was different than the postnatal darkness. Not so deep, yet somehow more pervasive. A flatness that smothered everything, a tinge of desperation in her thoughts, a clutching at the straws of strangers’ imagined lives.

  She told herself to stop being so maudlin.

  She pulled the cover from her basket and took out the crust of bread. She broke it into three pieces and hurled each as far as she could manage out onto the waves. Then she took the quetzal feathers and cast them into the breeze, watching them as they fluttered, some onto the water and some onto the rocks.

  Food for the journey and feathers for the passage. An old family tradition, perhaps even one that came from Earth.

  Softly, she wished the stranger a peaceful transition into the Accord.

  Milton had square shoulders and a square face. Most often, if you caught him unawares, you would see him smiling, because that was the way his features settled themselves.

  He was a good man.

  Tish came into the bar of the Falling Droplet just as Hilary and Dongsheng were leaving, having replaced the picture window through which the stranger and one of their bar chairs had plummeted the night before.

  Milton was looking out through the new glass, relaxed, smiling gently.

  Tish came up behind him, put her hands on his shoulders and turned him, kissed him, first close-mouthed and then, briefly, allowing her tongue to press between his lips.

  He stepped back, smiling more broadly now—a sure sign that he was unsettled by her ways. “Steady, steady!” he said. “What’s got into you, then, eh? Won that grand tour ticket or something?”

  “No,” she said. “Not that.” She took hold of a handful of his shirt and smiled. “No,” she went on, “I just want to fuck you, Milton.”

  He looked scared, like a small animal. Once, she had found that endearing.

  “But … ,” he said. “What if someone comes in?”

  “We’re closed.” She toyed with the handful of shirt she still had, knowing she was pulling at the hairs on his chest, knowing how that turned him on.

  “But Druce—”

  “Isn’t here,” she said.

  “But he might—”

  “So you’d better be quick.”

  But the moment was going, had gone. Had maybe never really been there at all.

  She released his shirt, moved away.

  “You’re a good man, Milton,” she said, looking out over the bay.

  When she glanced back over her shoulder, Milton was smiling, because that’s how his features tended to settle themselves.

  It would have ended there,
if she had not gone up top to the Shelf: the window repaired, the stranger and his three pursuers gone, the spark just beginning to return to Tish Goldenhawk’s life—and to Milton’s, whether he wanted it or not.

  But no, four days after paying tribute to the stranger’s passing over into the Accord, Tish took a shaft up to the top of the cliffs again, to the Shelf, and there she saw what her first response told her must be a ghost.

  Here, a row of homes and bars and shops lined the cliff top, so that one had to enter a building in order to enjoy the view over the bay to the Grand Falls.

  Tish had been in a bar called the Vanguard, sharing gossip with Billi Narwhal, a multicentenarian who was currently wearing his hair white on the principle that it advertised his many years of experience to any of the youngsters wanting lessons in love. The Vanguard was busy, with another two cruise ships in harbour having replaced the Lady Cecilia, now two days south.

  A little tipsy from Billi’s ruby port, Tish left the bar. A little way ahead of her was a man and there was something about the way he held himself, something about the slight taste of cinammon on her lips—on the air, a scent.

  He turned. The stranger. Undamaged, unblemished by his fall.

  Tish clutched at the door frame and blamed the ruby port, both for her unsteadiness and for the apparition.

  The stranger was no longer there. For a few seconds Tish was able to convince herself that he never had been.

  She gathered herself and tried to remember what she had come up to the Shelf to do. She hadn’t just come up here to gossip with Billi Narwhal and flatter herself with his attention.

  She pushed through the crowd. She was following him. Following so quickly that it was more pursuit than passive following.

  She paused, thinking of the three men in the Falling Droplet. Had it been like this for them? Were they mere innocents suddenly overcome with the urge to pursue? She knew such things were possible: the Accord could reach out to any individual and guide their actions.