The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  He weighed the playscript in his hand, frowning at it, sucking his aching teeth.

  It was August. There was no fire on the grate.

  He dropped the playscript on the sideboard, weighted it with the bribe, locked the door behind him, and went to tell the clerk—the cousin, he said, of the usual boy, who was abed with an ague—that he could go.

  * * * *

  WITWORTH:

  That’s Moll Tuppence. They call her Queene of Dogges.

  RIGHTEOUS-IN-THE-CAUSE SAMSON:

  For why?

  WITWORTH:

  For that if a man says aught about her which he ought not, she sets her curres to make him say naught in sooth.

  * * * *

  Sir Edmund Tylney lay awake in the night. His teeth pained him, and if he’d any sense, he’d have had them pulled that winter. No sense, he thought. No more sense than a tabby cat. Or a poet. And he lay abed and couldn’t sleep, haunted by the image of the papers on the sideboard, weighted under Jonson’s pouch. He should have burned them that afternoon.

  He would go and burn them now. Perhaps read them one more time, just to be certain there was no salvaging this play. Sometimes he would make suggestions, corrections, find ways—through cuts or additions—that a play could be made safe for performance. Sometimes the playmakers acquiesced, and the play was saved.

  Though Jonson was a newcomer, Tylney knew already that he did not take kindly to editing. But it was a good play.

  Perhaps there was a chance.

  Tylney roused himself and paced in the night, in his slippers and shirt, and found himself with candle in hand at the door of his office again. He unlocked it—the tumblers moving silently in the well-oiled catch—and pushed it before him without bothering to lift the candle or, in fact, look up from freeing key from lock.

  He knew where everything should be.

  The brilliant flash that blinded him came like lightning, like the spark of powder in the pan, and he shouted and threw a warding hand before his eyes, remembering even in his panic not to tip the candle. Someone cursed in a foreign tongue; a heavy hand closed on Tylney’s wrist and dragged him into his office, shouldering the door shut behind before he could cry out again.

  Whoever clutched him had a powerful grip. Was a big man, young, with soft uncallused hands. “Jonson,” he gasped, still half-blinded by the silent lightning, pink spots swimming before his eyes. “You’ll hang for this!”

  “Sir Edmund,” a gentle voice said over the rattle of metal, “I am sorry.”

  Too gentle to be Jonson, just as those hands, big as they were, were too soft for a soldier’s. Not Jonson. The replacement clerk. Tylney shook his head side to side, trying to rattle the dots out of his vision. He blinked, and could almost see, his candle casting a dim glow around the office. If he looked through the edges of his sight, he could make out the lay of the room—and what was disarrayed. The Ile of Dogges had been taken from the sideboard, the drapes drawn close across the windows and weighted at the bottom with Jonson’s bribe. Perhaps a quarter of the pages were turned.

  “I’ll shout and raise the house,” Tylney said.

  “You have already,” the clerk said. He released Tylney’s wrist once Tylney had steadied himself on the edge of the table, and turned back to the playscript.

  “There’s only one door out of this room.” And Tylney had his back to it. He could hear people moving, a voice calling out, seeking the source of that cry.

  “Sir Edmund, shield your eyes.” The clerk raised something to his own eye, a flat piece of metal no bigger than a lockplate, and rather like a lockplate, with a round hole in the middle.

  Tylney stepped forward instead and grabbed the clerk’s arm. “What are you doing?”

  The man paused, obviously on the verge of shoving Tylney to the floor, and stared at him. “Damn it to hell,” he said. “All right, look. I’m trying to save this play.”

  “From the fires?”

  “From oblivion,” he said. He dropped his arm and turned the plate so Tylney could see the back of it. His thumb passed over a couple of small nubs marked with red sigils, and Tylney gasped. As if through a camera obscura, the image of a page of The Ile of Dogges floated on a bit of glass imbedded in the back of the plate, as crisp and brightly lit as if by brilliant day. It wasn’t the page to which the play lay open. “My name’s Baldassare,” the clerk—the sorcerer—said. “I’m here to preserve this play. It was lost.”

  “Jonson’s summoned demons,” Tylney whispered, as someone pounded on the office door. It rattled, and did not open. Baldassare must have claimed the keys when he dragged Tylney inside, and fastened the lock while Tylney was still bedazzled. The light of the candle would show under the door, though. The servants would know he was here.

  It was his private office, and Tylney had one of only two keys. Someone would have to wake the steward for the other.

  He could shout. But Baldassare could kill him before the household could break down the door. And the sorcerer was staring at him, one eyebrow lifted, as if to see what he would do.

  Tylney held his tongue, and the door rattled once more before footsteps retreated.

  “Just a historian,” Baldassare answered, when the silence had stretched a minute or two.

  “Historian? But the play’s not three months old!”

  Baldassare shook his head. “Where I come from, it’s far older. And it’s—” He hesitated, seeming to search for a word. “It’s dead. No one has ever read it, or seen it performed. Most people don’t even know it once existed.” He laid fingertips on the papers, caressing. “Let me take it. Let me give it life.”

  “It’s sedition.” Tylney grasped the edge of the script, greatly daring, and pulled it from under Baldassare’s hand.

  “It’s brilliant,” Baldassare said, and Tylney couldn’t argue, though he bundled the papers close to his chest. The sorcerer had been strangely gentle with him, as a younger man with an older. Perhaps he could gamble on that. Perhaps. It was his duty to protect the queen.

  Baldassare continued, “None will know, no one shall read it, not until you and Elizabeth and Jonson and Nashe are long in your graves. It will do no harm. I swear it.”

  “A sorcerer’s word,” Tylney said. He stepped back, came up hard against the door. The keys weren’t in the lock. They must be in Baldassare’s hand.

  “Would you have it lost forever? Truly?” Baldassare reached and Tylney crowded away. Into the corner, the last place he could retreat. “Sir Edmund!” someone shouted from the hall.

  From outside the door, Tylney heard the jangle of keys, their rattle in the lock. “You’ll hang,” he said to Baldassare.

  “Maybe,” Baldassare said, with a sudden grin that showed his perfect, white teeth. “But not today.” One lingering, regretful look at the papers crumpled to Tylney’s chest, and he dropped the keys on the floor, touched something on the wrist of the hand that held the metal plate, and vanished in a shimmer of air as Tylney gaped after him.

  The door burst open, framing Tylney’s steward, John, against blackness.

  Tylney flinched.

  “Sir Edmund?” The man came forward, a candle in one hand, the keys in the other. “Are you well?”

  “Well enough,” Tylney answered, forcing himself not to crane his neck after the vanished man. He could claim a demon had appeared in his work room, right enough. He could claim it, but who would believe?

  He swallowed, and eased his grip on the play clutched to his chest. “I dropped the keys.”

  The steward frowned doubtfully. “You cried out, milord.”

  “I stumbled only,” Tylney said. “I feared for the candle. But all is well.” He laid the playscript on the table and smoothed the pages as his steward squatted to retrieve the fallen keys. “I thank you your concern.”

  The keys were cool and heavy, and clinked against each other like debased coins when the steward handed them over. Tylney laid them on the table beside the candle and the play. He lifted the co
in purse from the window ledge, flicked the drapes back, and weighted the pages with the money once more before throwing wide the shutters, heedless of the night air. It was a still summer night, the stink of London rising from the gutters, but a draft could always surprise you, and he didn’t feel like chasing paper into corners.

  The candle barely flickered. “Sir Edmund?”

  “That will be all, John. Thank you.”

  Silently, the steward withdrew, taking his candle and his own keys with him. He left the door yawning open on darkness. Tylney stood at his table for a moment, watching the empty space.

  He and John had the only keys. Baldassare had come and gone like a devil stepping back and forth from Hell. Without the stink of brimstone, though. Perhaps more like an angel. Or memory, which could walk through every room in Tylney’s house, through every playhouse in London, and leave no sign.

  Tylney bent on creaking knees and laid kindling on the hearth. He stood, and looked at the playscript, one-quarter of the pages turned where it rested on the edge of his writing table, the other three-fourths crumpled and crudely smoothed. He turned another page, read a line in Jonson’s hand, and one in Nashe’s. His lips stretched over his aching teeth, and he chuckled into his beard.

  He laid the pages down. No more sense than a tabby cat. It was late for making a fire. He could burn the play in the morning. Before he returned Jonson’s bribe. He’d lock the door behind him, so no one could come in or out. There were only two sets of keys.

  Sir Edmund Tylney blew the candle out, and trudged upstairs through the customary dark.

  In the morning, he’d see to the burning.

  * * * *

  1 All quotations are from the Poet Emeritus Series edition of The Ile of Dogges, edited by Anthony Baldassare (Las Vegas, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2206).

  * * * *

  THE HIGHWAY MEN

  Ken MacLeod

  Ken MacLeod graduated with a B.Sc. in zoology from Glasgow University in 1976. Following research in biomechanics at Brunei University, he worked as a computer analyst/programmer in Edinburgh. He’s now a full-time writer, and widely considered to be one of the most exciting new SF writers to emerge in the nineties, his work featuring an emphasis on politics and economics rare in the new space opera, while still maintaining all the widescreen, high-bit-rate, action-packed qualities typical of the form. His first two novels, The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal, each won the Prometheus Award. His other books include the novels The Sky Road, The Cassini Division, Cosmonaut Keep, Dark Light, Engine City, and Newton’s Wake, plus a novella chapbook, The Human Front. His most recent books are the novel Learning the World and a collection, Strange Lizards from Another Star. His stories have appeared in our Nineteenth and Twenty-third Annual Collections. He lives in West Lothian, Scotland, with his wife and children.

  Here he takes us to a glum and diminished future world that yet contains within it a surprising amount of hope -seeds of hope randomly scattered and growing in the most unexpected of fields.

  * * * *

  I

  DIAMOND CUTTING

  IT WAS Murdo Mac who noticed it first. He was riding shotgun. So he could see farther ahead. I had to keep my eye on the road. First I know of it, Murdo bangs on the cab roof. Signal to stop. I braked gently. The early morning road was icy and treacherous. We were about half a kilometre outside a village a bit out from Dingwall. More a thin straggle of houses, really, like most villages in the Highlands. And like most, it was empty. We knew that.

  I rolled down the window. Cold air came in. Murdo poked his head into the cab. His face was red inside the furry parka hood.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “There’s something no right about yon houses,” he said. “Can’t for the life of me see what it is, though.”

  I looked sideways at Euan Campbell. He handed me the binoculars. I propped my elbows on the steering wheel and got the glasses into focus. The five or six houses were on a curve of the road up ahead. I could see all of them. They had that Highland look of being out of place. Like suburban houses stuck down on the moors. Gardens overgrown, sheds falling apart, big bay windows black and empty.

  That was it.

  “Nae glass in the windows,” I said. “In any of the windows. And it’s not broken, either. Just missing.” I passed the binoculars out to Murdo. “See for yourself.”

  He fiddled with the focus wheel. Clumsy in thick gloves. He drew in a sharp breath as he looked.

  “That’s it,” he said as he handed the glasses back.

  “Not much to go on,” said Euan.

  “Doesn’t look right,” said Murdo.

  “Hunker down,” I said. “We’ll take it slow.”

  Murdo’s head disappeared from the window. Checking the wing mirror I could see he had ducked back into the lookout’s bucket. Shaped like an oil drum, it was bolted to the back of the cab, right behind the driver. It had a low seat, and a roll of armour padding wrapped around the inside. Not very comfortable. We used to take turns.

  I eased into first gear and the big highway truck rolled forward. Three hundred metres. Two hundred. One hundred. The first house had a pair of tall rowans growing at the gap where the gate had been. Couldn’t say they had brought much luck. I braked and turned off the engine.

  No sound but a blackbird’s song and the questioning croak of a hoodie crow up on the hill.

  “I’ll have a look,” I said. I jumped out of the cab with a thud of wellies and a crackle of oilskins. “Keep me covered, Murdo.” Even to myself it sounded a bit corny.

  “Are we in China or what?” Murdo scoffed.

  “It’s you that’s got us twitchy,” I pointed out.

  “Whatever you say, Jase.” Murdo pushed back his parka hood and planted a helmet on his head. The end of the shotgun barrel poked over the rim of the bucket.

  I walked up the grassy strip where the path had been. A plastic tricycle, its colours faded, lay in the weeds to one side. I kicked a flat football out of the way and stepped over a broken plant-pot to look at the big window to the right of the door. I glanced inside the room behind the empty window, just to check. A rotting sofa against the far wall, a coffee jar, a mouldy mug. No dangers there. I looked down at the window frame. Above the cracked wood and blistered paint there was maybe half an inch of glass. It was the same all around the frame. The glass had been cut out. I moved to the window on the other side—another empty room, with a plastic chair in the middle of the floor—and found the same. Farther around the house was the wee window of the downstairs lavvy. Half an inch of frosted glass along all four sides of it.

  I crunched through frosty bracken and nettles, put my foot on the sagging wire of the fence, and hopped into the next empty house. Same deal with the windows.

  “Someone’s cut out all die glass with a glass cutter,” I said, back at the lorry.

  “’With a glass cutter’!” Euan mocked. “Whatever next?”

  “Why would anybody bother?” I asked. “They could buy all the glass they wanted in Inverness.”

  “To save themselves the drive to Inverness,” said Murdo.

  “We’re wasting our time here,” said Euan.

  “We can spare a minute,” I said. I turned and walked to the fifth house along. It was smaller than the others and had no garden. The front-room window was cut out just like the others. In the room was a bedstead up against the back wall. It didn’t look like it had been a bedroom. I imagined a sick person lying there, gazing out.

  Gazing out. Suddenly it hit me that I’d been looking at this the wrong way. Really looking the wrong way. I stepped to the door and pushed. It swung open. Inside I found a narrow hallway with stairs a few steps ahead. There were a lot of scratches on the walls and the banister, and on the floor leading into the room. When I looked through, I saw that the scratches led straight to the legs of the bedstead.

  The bedstead had been dragged in. When the floor was bare after the carpets and everything else had been ta
ken from the house.

  I sat down on the creaking springs and looked out the empty window. I could see the road and a low dry-stone wall. A patch of overgrown grass on the other side. Then the moor behind it and the hills in the far distance. Long shadows of short fenceposts. That frozen yellow grass across the way would be a sweet green meadow in the spring and summer. The wild sheep would come down from the hills and eat it. Them or the deer. The deer would be way down the hills now, off the moors and into the glens.

  “Got ya!” I said to myself. I was out the door and across the road in a minute. I jumped the ditch and the wall into the meadow and searched along the foot of the wall at the far side. I knew what I was looking for, but it was pure luck that I spotted it: a gleam of steel. I bent over and picked up a six-inch bolt with a blunt point at one end. The other end was tapered with four narrow raised bits like low fins along it. It looked like a toy rocket.