The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “Should I have refused?”

  “I don’t think so,” Teyeo said. He stood up and stretched, but sat down again looking dizzy. “You bargain well,” he said.

  “We’ll see what we get. Oh, God. What is going on?”

  “Maybe,” he said slowly, “Gatay is unwilling to yield to these demands. But when Voe Deo – and your Ekumen – get word of it, they’ll put pressure on Gatay.”

  “I wish they’d get moving. I suppose Gatay is horribly embarrassed, saving face by trying to conceal the whole thing – is that likely? How long can they keep it up? What about your people? Won’t they be hunting for you?”

  “No doubt,” he said, in his polite way.

  It was curious how his stiff manner, his manners, which had always shunted her aside, cut her out, here had quite another effect: his restraint and formality reassured her that she was still part of the world outside this room, from which they came and to which they would return, a world where people lived long lives.

  What did long life matter? she asked herself, and didn’t know. It was nothing she had ever thought about before. But these young Patriots lived in a world of short lives. Demands, violence, immediacy, and death, for what? for a bigotry, a hatred, a rush of power.

  “Whenever they leave,” she said in a low voice, “I get really frightened.”

  Teyeo cleared his throat and said, “So do I.”

  Exercises.

  “Take hold – no, take hold, I’m not made of glass! – Now—”

  “Ha!” he said, with his flashing grin of excitement, as she showed him the break, and he in turn repeated it, breaking from her.

  “All right, now you’d be waiting – here” – thump – “see?”

  “Ai!”

  “I’m sorry – I’m sorry, Teyeo – I didn’t think about your head – Are you all right? I’m really sorry—”

  “Oh, Kamye,” he said, sitting up and holding his black, narrow head between his hands. He drew several deep breaths. She knelt penitent and anxious.

  “That’s,” he said, and breathed some more, “that’s not, not fair play.”

  “No of course it’s not, it’s aiji – all’s fair in love and war, they say that on Terra – Really, I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry, that was so stupid of me!”

  He laughed, a kind of broken and desperate laugh, shook his head, shook it again. “Show me,” he said. “I don’t know what you did.”

  Exercises.

  “What do you do with your mind?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You just let it wander?”

  “No. Am I and my mind different beings?”

  “So . . . you don’t focus on something? You just wander with it?”

  “No.”

  “So you don’t let it wander.”

  “Who?” he said, rather testily.

  A pause.

  “Do you think about—”

  “No,” he said. “Be still.”

  A very long pause, maybe a quarter hour.

  “Teyeo, I can’t. I itch. My mind itches. How long have you been doing this?”

  A pause, a reluctant answer: “Since I was two.”

  He broke his utterly relaxed motionless pose, bent his head to stretch his neck and shoulder muscles. She watched him.

  “I keep thinking about long life, about living long,” she said. “I don’t mean just being alive a long time, hell, I’ve been alive about eleven hundred years, what does that mean, nothing. I mean . . . Something about thinking of life as long makes a difference. Like having kids does. Even thinking about having kids. It’s like it changes some balance. It’s funny I keep thinking about that now, when my chances for a long life have kind of taken a steep fall . . .”

  He said nothing. He was able to say nothing in a way that allowed her to go on talking. He was one of the least talkative men she had ever known. Most men were so wordy. She was fairly wordy herself. He was quiet. She wished she knew how to be quiet.

  “It’s just practice, isn’t it?” she asked. “Just sitting there.”

  He nodded.

  “Years and years and years of practice . . . Oh, God. Maybe . . .”

  “No, no,” he said, taking her thought immediately.

  “But why don’t they do something? What are they waiting for? It’s been nine days!”

  From the beginning, by unplanned, unspoken agreement, the room had been divided in two: the line ran down the middle of the mattress and across to the facing wall. The door was on her side, the left; the shit-hole was on his side, the right. Any invasion of the other’s space was requested by some almost invisible cue and permitted the same way. When one of them used the shit-hole the other unobtrusively faced away. When they had enough water to take cat-baths, which was seldom, the same arrangement held. The line down the middle of the mattress was absolute. Their voices crossed it, and the sounds and smells of their bodies. Sometimes she felt his warmth; Werelian body temperature was somewhat higher than hers, and in the dank, still air she felt that faint radiance as he slept. But they never crossed the line, not by a finger, not in the deepest sleep.

  Solly thought about this, finding it, in some moments, quite funny. At other moments it seemed stupid and perverse. Couldn’t they both use some human comfort? The only time she had touched him was the first day, when she had helped him get onto the mattress, and then when they had enough water she had cleaned his scalp wound and little by little washed the clotted, stinking blood out of his hair, using the comb, which had after all been a good thing to have, and pieces of the Goddess’s skirt, an invaluable source of washcloths and bandages. Then once his head healed, they practiced aiji daily; but aiji had an impersonal, ritual purity to its clasps and grips that was a long way from creature comfort. The rest of the time his bodily presence was clearly, invariably uninvasive and untouchable.

  He was only maintaining, under incredibly difficult circumstances, the rigid restraint he had always shown. Not just he, but Rewe, too; all of them, all of them but Batikam; and yet was Batikam’s instant yielding to her whim and desire the true contact she had thought it? She thought of the fear in his eyes, that last night. Not restraint, but constraint.

  It was the mentality of a slave society: slaves and masters caught in the same trap of radical distrust and self-protection.

  “Teyeo,” she said, “I don’t understand slavery. Let me say what I mean,” though he had shown no sign of interruption or protest, merely civil attention. “I mean, I do understand how a social institution comes about and how an individual is simply part of it – I’m not saying why don’t you agree with me in seeing it as wicked and unprofitable, I’m not asking you to defend it or renounce it. I’m trying to understand what it feels like to believe that two-thirds of the human beings in your world are actually, rightfully your property. Five-sixths, in fact, including women of your caste.”

  After a while he said, “My family owns about twenty-five assets.”

  “Don’t quibble.”

  He accepted the reproof.

  “It seems to me that you cut off human contact. You don’t touch slaves and slaves don’t touch you, in the way human beings ought to touch, in mutuality. You have to keep yourselves separate, always working to maintain that boundary. Because it isn’t a natural boundary – it’s totally artificial, manmade. I can’t tell owners and assets apart physically. Can you?”

  “Mostly.”

  “By cultural, behavioral clues – right?”

  After thinking a while, he nodded.

  “You are the same species, race, people, exactly the same in every way, with a slight selection towards color. If you brought up an asset child as an owner it would be an owner in every respect, and vice versa. So you spend your lives keeping up this tremendous division that doesn’t exist. What I don’t understand is how you can fail to see how appallingly wasteful it is. I don’t mean economically!”

  “In the war,” he said, and then there was a very long pause; though Solly ha
d a lot more to say, she waited, curious. “I was on Yeowe,” he said, “you know, in the civil war.”

  That’s where you got all those scars and dents, she thought; for however scrupulously she averted her eyes, it was impossible not to be familiar with his spare, onyx body by now, and she knew that in aiji he had to favor his left arm, which had a considerable chunk out of it just above the bicep.

  “The slaves of the Colonies revolted, you know, some of them at first, then all of them. Nearly all. So we Army men there were all owners. We couldn’t send asset soldiers, they might defect. We were all veots and volunteers. Owners fighting assets. I was fighting my equals. I learned that pretty soon. Later on I learned I was fighting my superiors. They defeated us.”

  “But that—” Solly said, and stopped; she did not know what to say.

  “They defeated us from beginning to end,” he said. “Partly because my government didn’t understand that they could. That they fought better and harder and more intelligently and more bravely than we did.”

  “Because they were fighting for their freedom!”

  “Maybe so,” he said in his polite way.

  “So . . .”

  “I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought.”

  “I know so little about war, about fighting,” she said, with a mixture of contrition and irritation. “Nothing, really. I was on Kheakh, but that wasn’t war, it was racial suicide, mass slaughter of a biosphere. I guess there’s a difference . . . That was when the Ekumen finally decided on the Arms Convention, you know. Because of Orint and then Kheakh destroying themselves. The Terrans had been pushing for the Convention for ages. Having nearly committed suicide themselves a while back. I’m half-Terran. My ancestors rushed around their planet slaughtering each other. For millennia. They were masters and slaves, too, some of them, a lot of them . . . But I don’t know if the Arms Convention was a good idea. If it’s right. Who are we to tell anybody what to do and not to do? The idea of the Ekumen was to offer a way. To open it. Not to bar it to anybody.”

  He listened intently, but said nothing until after some while. “We learn to . . . close ranks. Always. You’re right, I think, it wastes . . . energy, the spirit. You are open.”

  His words cost him so much, she thought, not like hers that just came dancing out of the air and went back into it. He spoke from his marrow. It made what he said a solemn compliment, which she accepted gratefully, for as the days went on she realized occasionally how much confidence she had lost and kept losing: self-confidence, confidence that they would be ransomed, rescued, that they would get out of this room, that they would get out of it alive.

  “Was the war very brutal?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I can’t . . . I’ve never been able to – to see it – Only something comes like a flash—” He held his hands up as if to shield his eyes. Then he glanced at her, wary. His apparently cast-iron self-respect was, she knew now, vulnerable in many places.

  “Things from Kheakh that I didn’t even know I saw, they come that way,” she said. “At night.” And after a while, “How long were you there?”

  “A little over seven years.”

  She winced. “Were you lucky?”

  It was a queer question, not coming out the way she meant, but he took it at value. “Yes,” he said. “Always. The men I went there with were killed. Most of them in the first few years. We lost three hundred thousand men on Yeowe. They never talk about it. Two-thirds of the veot men in Voe Deo were killed. If it was lucky to live, I was lucky.” He looked down at his clasped hands, locked into himself.

  After a while she said softly, “I hope you still are.”

  He said nothing.

  “How long has it been?” he asked, and she said, clearing her throat, after an automatic glance at her watch, “Sixty hours.”

  Their captors had not come yesterday at what had become a regular time, about eight in the morning. Nor had they come this morning.

  With nothing left to eat and now no water left, they had grown increasingly silent and inert. It was hours since either had said anything. He had put off asking the time as long as he could prevent himself.

  “This is horrible,” she said, “this is so horrible. I keep thinking . . .”

  “They won’t abandon you,” he said. “They feel a responsibility.”

  “Because I’m a woman?”

  “Partly.”

  “Shit.”

  He remembered that in the other life her coarseness had offended him.

  “They’ve been taken, shot. Nobody bothered to find out where they were keeping us,” she said.

  Having thought the same thing several hundred times, he had nothing to say.

  “It’s just such a horrible place to die,” she said. “It’s sordid. I stink. I’ve stunk for twenty days. Now I have diarrhea because I’m scared. But I can’t shit anything. I’m thirsty and I can’t drink.”

  “Solly,” he said sharply. It was the first time he had spoken her name. “Be still. Hold fast.”

  She stared at him.

  “Hold fast to what?”

  He did not answer at once and she said, “You won’t let me touch you!”

  “Not to me—”

  “Then to what? There isn’t anything!” He thought she was going to cry, but she stood up, took the empty tray, and beat it against the door till it smashed into fragments of wicker and dust. “Come! God damn you! Come, you bastards!” she shouted. “Let us out of here!”

  After that she sat down again on the mattress. “Well,” she said.

  “Listen,” he said.

  They had heard it before: no city sounds came down to this cellar, wherever it was, but this was something bigger, explosions, they both thought.

  The door rattled.

  They were both afoot when it opened: not with the usual clash and clang, but slowly. A man waited outside; two men came in. One, armed, they had never seen; the other, the tough-faced young man they called the spokesman, looked as if he had been running or fighting, dusty, worn-out, a little dazed. He closed the door. He had some papers in his hand. The four of them stared at one another in silence for a minute.

  “Water,” Solly said. “You bastards!”

  “Lady,” the spokesman said, “I’m sorry.” He was not listening to her. His eyes were not on her. He was looking at Teyeo, for the first time. “There is a lot of fighting,” he said.

  “Who’s fighting?” Teyeo asked, hearing himself drop into the even tone of authority, and the young man respond to it as automatically: “Voe Deo. They sent troops. After the funeral, they said they would send troops unless we surrendered. They came yesterday. They go through the city killing. They know all the Old Believer centers. Some of ours.” He had a bewildered, accusing note in his voice.

  “What funeral?” Solly said.

  When he did not answer, Teyeo repeated it: “What funeral?”

  “The lady’s funeral, yours. Here – I brought net prints – A state funeral. They said you died in the explosion.”

  “What Goddamned explosion?” Solly said in her hoarse, parched voice, and this time he answered her: “At the Festival. The Old Believers. The fire, Tual’s fire, there were explosives in it. Only it went off too soon. We knew their plan. We rescued you from that, Lady,” he said, suddenly turning to her with that same accusatory tone.

  “Rescued me, you asshole!” she shouted, and Teyeo’s dry lips split in a startled laugh, which he repressed at once.

  “Give me those,” he said, and the young man handed him the papers.

  “Get us water!” Solly said.

  “Stay here, please. We need to talk,” Teyeo said, instinctively holding on to his ascendancy. He sat down on the mattress with the net prints. Within a few minutes he and Solly had scanned the reports of the shocking disruption of the Festival of Forgiveness, the lamentable death of the Envoy of the Ekumen in a terrorist act executed by the cult of Old Believers, the brief mention of the death of a Voe Dean Embass
y guard in the explosion, which had killed over seventy priests and onlookers, the long descriptions of the state funeral, reports of unrest, terrorism, reprisals, then reports of the Palace gratefully accepting offers of assistance from Voe Deo in cleaning out the cancer of terrorism . . .

  “So,” he said finally. “You never heard from the Palace. Why did you keep us alive?”

  Solly looked as if she thought the question lacked tact, but the spokesman answered with equal bluntness, “We thought your country would ransom you.”

  “They will,” Teyeo said. “Only you have to keep your government from knowing we’re alive. If you—”

  “Wait,” Solly said, touching his hand. “Hold on. I want to think about this stuff. You’d better not leave the Ekumen out of the discussion. But getting in touch with them is the tricky bit.”

  “If there are Voe Dean troops here, all I need is to get a message to anyone in my command, or the Embassy Guards.”

  Her hand was still on his, with a warning pressure. She shook the other one at the spokesman, finger outstretched:” You kidnapped an Envoy of the Ekumen, you asshole! Now you have to do the thinking you didn’t do ahead of time. And I do too, because I don’t want to get blown away by your Goddamned little government for turning up alive and embarrassing them. Where are you hiding, anyhow? Is there any chance of us getting out of this room, at least?”

  The man, with that edgy, frantic look, shook his head. “We are all down here now,” he said. “Most of the time. You stay here safe.”

  “Yes, you’d better keep your passports safe!” Solly said. “Bring us some water, damn it! Let us talk a while. Come back in an hour.”

  The young man leaned towards her suddenly, his face contorted. “What the hell kind of lady you are,” he said. “You foreign filthy stinking cunt.”

  Teyeo was on his feet, but her grip on his hand had tightened: after a moment of silence, the spokesman and the other man turned to the door, rattled the lock, and were let out.

  “Ouf,” she said, looking dazed.

  “Don’t,” he said, “don’t—” He did not know how to say it. “They don’t understand,” he said. “It’s better if I talk.”