The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  “Personal business. People we know going in.” The beautiful lie. No point mentioning The Redux yet.

  “You’re worried they’ll find something.”

  “That they’ll upset something more like. Despite The Sailmaker’s power, things have been pretty stable since it arrived. Fewer shutdowns. Fewer communities going under. They could change the balance.”

  “So like I said. You’re looking out for us.” Jumping, jumping.

  “Whatever. One team usually needs another to watch it. We’ve been hired to keep an eye on this other team.” Not the truth, but near enough.

  Thomas nodded, looked out at the day through the prep room window.

  “One more thing, Mr. Aitch. They say there are two secrets all flashmen keep.”

  Sam feared: Tell me what they are, but the kid was smarter, better than that. He jumped, but knew what not to say.

  “How long before I’m trusted enough to be allowed to ask what they are?”

  Two secrets indeed. The make or break when it came to the flash crews.

  “Ask again when the mission’s over. Now a question to you, Thomas.”

  “Shoot, Mr. Aitch.”

  “How come you played dumb with the others?”

  Thomas Gunn spread his hands in a “you know how it is” gesture that was probably as old as Cro-Magnons. “First thing I learned about flashmen. Always keep something back.”

  Sam almost smiled, but stood instead to hide the rush of emotion. “Time to make a move.”

  As it turned out, quite a few of the old Big Name crews were going in. The wildfire, pond-ripple, rumor mill prevailed as ever it had. Word of one team activated meant something happening on the QT; best keep an eye out just in case. Sponsors appeared like magic: governments, corporations, citizen protection groups, patents and futures speculators old and new. Good sense. Contingency and precaution.

  One of Punky’s former lieutenants, Baine Couse, had put together a rag-tag band – the Argentics on the registration database – with Rollo Jayne and Toss Gatereau in the line-up. Molly Dye had reactivated her Lonetown Farriers, once definitely second stringers all, but a real force now that Rod Sinner had been brought in to replace Corven, lost at The Sailmaker in ’35. Julie Farro and Yancy Cada had a new line-up of their Spin Doctors ready to go. Other names he knew. Many he didn’t.

  Riding the wind-tram out to the Baylieu Gate, Sam shook his head at the wonder of it. Conspiracy theory always messed things up. The chats were crazy with it, the seaboard axis abuzz. All the new coastal cities were making a feature of it. Four teams now, forty later. They’d be tripping over themselves before they were an hour along – most of them makeshift tagger groups of newbies and quarterhands dueling it out on the fringes, maybe risking The Spanish Lantern, The Moonraker and The Three Spices, then scuttling back to the bars and chats with improbable stories that grew larger with every telling. Not just in Australia either. The African coastal axis had groups stirring; the West American axis pre-empted everyone by sending a team to check the sub-Saharan Landings. French teams were heading for the Gobi Desert outside Sagran. The flashmen. The leones. Darlings of the WHO doctors. The ten years were like smoke.

  The WHO perimeter units gave the teams access in twos, and the Trimmers and the Regulators were promised a clear day’s lead before the Argentics and the Farriers, then the Spin Doctors, The Sneaky Pete Regulars and the rest of the official line-up. Some newbie crews would jump queue around that vast boundary. Some would be wasted quick; the rest would be nabbed by the authorities on the way out. Easier to let the Landings tidy things up first. There’d be penalties, token sentences in the new barrios, but ultimately WHO didn’t care so long as flashpoints were dealt with and data – any data after all this time – was forthcoming. Better they risk another Krackenslough they secretly figured, secretly gambled, unofficially believed, than not know anything about their deadly visitors.

  At Baylieu Gate there was more waiting, of course. The orbitals needed to track the complex fluxes, wait for what they considered to be suitable hiatus readings before giving the go-ahead – all frustratingly unnecessary from a crew’s hands-on perspective. It was 1400 that afternoon before the Trimmers rode their WHO-provided slow-mo ATV through Checkpoint Sinbad and left civilization – human civilization – behind.

  Then, yet again, they were a law unto themselves. Champions of the hopes of the world. Officially indispensable. Unofficially expendable.

  The first site reached from the southeast, soon after full radio noise-out, was Winwa Landing, what had once been The Firewalker because of its random plasma screens and dissociated spark-ups. Some of the Landings failed, fell away, re-located in new forms elsewhere, who could ever know? All that was left were the pylons, struts and gantries of the old WHO/local natgov access piers. It was like that at Winwa.

  Working with World Health, most national governments had set up inspection piers early on wherever they could, long raised causeways with observation towers and telemetry nodes. They looked like the promenade piers of a previous age, and were as much to frame the phenomena as anything, to provide frameworks, form and sense, things you could put on a map and treat as quantifiable, borders around chaos. Sand drifts had moved in, the wind and heat had stripped the paintwork. Winwa Landing was a ghost town that had never lived.

  They spent the night in the lee of the seventh pylon, listening to what were left of the causeway struts ticking and cooling overhead and watching the faintest play of bravura lights tricking around the inward flare-tail – all that remained of what The Firewalker had once been.

  They repacked their slow-mo before dawn and moved on, making forty k’s along the Delphin Track and passing The Arete before it became fully active. Then it was The Pure off to their left, three k’s distant but already flexing and extending its clear-glass “soul-finders” in the day.

  They were passing The Lucky Boatmen when they saw their first whirter assembling in the distance – three of its fourteen pieces spinning in the warm air, orbiting each other as they sought lock-point for the rest. The Trimmers would be well past before it posed a threat, but some other team would have it to deal with. How it usually happened – one group triggering sentinel responses that wasted another. Proof either that no other crew had come in at Winwa yet or, far less likely but not impossible given how UN agencies competed, that enough had done so to complete one fourteen-stage whirter cycle and start another.

  By mid-morning they were passing The Spanish Lantern on its eastern side, keeping their focus on the trail ahead and only using peripheral vision to note the flickering orange, blue and red semaphore-at-noon running lights amid the balconies and bastions of the fluted blast-furnace form. They wore their headsets to dampen the teeth-chattering castanet siren rhythms that gave it its name. So many taggers and newbies would go closer, wanting to see the fiesta lights on the lower balconies, never believing that anything could happen to them. Some would get the approach rhythms wrong and end up as part of the deadly duende of the place. It was Thomas who said he could see bodies, “dancers” who had missed those syncopations and couldn’t get free in time, and were now pressed into final service. No-one acknowledged his lapse of form. He was left to work out for himself that you never mentioned the dead and dying. You accepted and moved on.

  They reached The Horse on the second day, considered by many the most remarkable of the Landings – image after life-sized image of horses from every artistic period in known Earth history: as if the governing intelligence, AI, tropism, whatever powered the thing, had locked onto that one bioform and replicated it again and again – in bronze, in wood, in ceramic, resin, volcanic glass, bone and sewn skin, line after line of stylized equiforms scattered across the spinifex hills.

  The Horse also gave Thomas his first glimpse of a burrus. The veteran Trimmers had been preparing him for it, each of them filling the time by telling him what to expect. Even Walt had managed: “It’s all eye-trick shit. Just make sure your coal’s there
.”

  The profile had been on the WHO database. The typical burrus – a handball-sized knob of airborne porcelain – usually traveled at chest height and aimed for the thymus, tucked away behind the breast bone. No saying why it did, no knowing things like that, just that it did. Carrying lumps of anthracite in your pockets seemed to deflect most of them – where the old name “coal-pockets” came from that some people still used for flashmen in some parts of the world. But anthracite, for heaven’s sake, to ward off something that went for your immune system, that seemed to live to do just that.

  This small white avatar came streaking up to them from among the closest equiforms, hovered, held, stayed with them for an hour, sometimes bobbing, twitching in sudden, unnerving ways, then streaked away, soundless.

  Two aylings came at them next, all high comedy were they not designed to detonate, fleschette-fashion. Sam did ayling duty as usual, briefing Thomas as the constructs approached.

  “Watch now. These are faux-boys from what one overzealous WHO scientist christened Smart Landings. Leave it to me.”

  “Foe boys?” Thomas said, eyes never leaving the two figures on the trail.

  “Faux.” Sam spelled it out. “Old word for fakes. Maquettes. Made and sent by the Smarts.”

  “They’re so human.”

  “They think they are. They’re aylings. Clones. Synths.”

  “The Landings that sample g-codes.”

  “Right. If the Landings are traps, they’re taking bits of whatever they can get to do their trapping. We’re the most advanced local lifeform, so they sample us, turn out these.”

  “Parts of the trap.”

  “But the aylings don’t know it. The thing is, if you play along, they stay friendly, finally reach a range limit and turn back.”

  The aylings spoke a strange clipped teev dialect gleaned from a century of vintage sat transmissions.

  “Holoner De Gorvemax,” the taller, rangier one introduced itself as, affecting a human male voice to go with its not-quite-right male mannequin appearance. “We’ve found a good route.”

  So simple, so obvious.

  “Hutman Von Vexator,” said the other, affecting female and as unreal as a well-made store mannequin. “Hol’s right. Quick run out by The Four Doormen. Get you through in no time. None of the fluxes.” Voice surprisingly good.

  “That right?” Sam said. “Need to see The Quilter first. Business to attend to out by The Quilter. Then we’ll try your way.”

  The aylings frowned at each other, sensing deflection but not sure how to make a “No” out of a provisional “Yes”.

  Sam kept up the banter, making them run whatever menus they had. “Be good to see The Four Doormen again. Just need this quick detour first. Be good to have you along.”

  Sunny took the Trimmers straight for The Caress then. No time to do the usual Quilter deflection. Not with a flashpoint. The Redux had struck. People out in the world were dying.

  The Caress already had someone in its moil, a young male tagger who must have jumped the border undetected. Solitaries could manage it. He was already stripped and marked for portioning. You could see the terror on his face, the acceptance, the shocked fascination at having his body marked out for vivisection, then the beatific calm as the modals shifted, even more terrifying to see.

  It had taken eleven years for WHO to figure out that what had been known as whirters – assemblages of fourteen accreting parts – were actually the hunt avatars of this uniquely tripartite Landing called The Caress. Once the whirter had assembled and its prey was caught and phased away, the victim hadn’t been sent to oblivion as first thought, despite the measurable energy release, but had been sent off to the Landing itself. A whirter had tracked and caught this youth, faxed him home to where he now hung unsupported three meters in the air, by turns being lulled and soothed, then shown the full measure of his pending demise – as if the Landing drew on the rapid shift of disparate emotions. This cat-and-mouse function applied to The Caress’s other parts in central Africa and the American mid-west.

  “You wait by those outer flanges,” Sam told the aylings. “We’re ahead of time. We’ll just check our route, and then we can see The Four Doormen.”

  The aylings suspected nothing. They went towards the outer questing arms of The Caress, were snatched, lofted, then promptly canceled as the Landing identified them as something of their own kind. There one moment, gone the next.

  As the Trimmers’ route brought them closer to The Redux, it was inevitable that they finally catch sight of Punky’s Regulators. Towards evening they had their first glimpse of their old rivals, saw another campfire start up a mile or so off in the dusk a few minutes after theirs did. Direct com remained out, of course, but Sunny used the radio handset to send the braka, the switch-on, switch-off static rhythm that meant “come hither,” “no threat,” “parley”. Coffee was set going. Extra cups and rations were laid out.

  Twenty minutes later, a deputation of Regulators cooee’d approach, then were there: Punky, Jack Crowfeather and, yes, Maisie Day.

  Again the ten years were forgotten, impossible. There in the dark, Sam grinned wryly at having even tried to make another life. Among flash crews you either owned what you were or pretended. You never signed off – not having seen The Breakwater turn careless friends to clutches of sticks, seen the Lantern set them twitching off to their doom, seen the lines of antique horses frozen mid-stride across the spinifex ridges, the fierce nacreous gleam of The Pearl with its – surprise! surprise! – reverse-pattern oyster trap designed solely to lure the curious. It seemed. The Trimmers, the Regulators, shouldn’t be here. No-one should be here. But having tasted, having turned them, switched the modes, there was no staying away.

  Then, seeing Maisie large and limber as life, a bigger woman than ever he’d preferred till he’d met her, Sam realized how his smile must seem and lost it at once, probably way too late.

  So much resolve here, so many realities disregarded in the instant. Two crews meeting again, protected by the braka truce, the cooee, the old courtesies.

  “The Trimmers, as they cleverly appear to live and breathe!” Punky said, lean and powerful in his Singer duster, big smile and white crew-cut like a double night-light in the dusk. Crowfeather had a smile too, but like a smug surgeon, a good foil for Walt Senny any day but without Walt’s final kiss of style. “Best aylings ever to grace the sand-box!” Jack said. Maisie Day gave a civil nod but looked way too frosty and focused. She had seen Sam’s smile on the way in.

  Sunny and Angie gave generous greetings. Walt managed a cool hello. Sam heard his own voice murmur something, managed most of a new smile, thin, careful. Then he introduced Thomas, who sat wide-eyed, taking it all in as they got down to business.

  “Sailmaker Two, if you can believe it,” Sunny said, all easy, playing good cop as he always did. “The Redux, if you agree.”

  Punky eased himself onto the cooling sand, stuck out his long legs and raised his palms to the fire.

  “Indeed,” he said. “Bringing up Junior. Who would’ve thought? How we playing this?”

  “Make an offer.” Walt said, before Punky had finished speaking.

  Punky flashed his smile, warming his hands in the desert chill. Sam watched the night, watched Maisie, watched the night again. For all he knew, the rest of the Regulators were out in the dark, getting ready to settle old scores outside the courtesies. There was little demonstrated love here, but perhaps Sunny was right. Perhaps they should always allow the possibility of something more.

  And Maisie. She looked good. Fierce and wonderful. Fuller. Heavier. Vital.

  “Working the mode shift is all that matters,” Punky said, eminently practical. “Share the fee. Go tandem, turn about. Your call, Sunny. Dibs on first unless you want to toss for it.”

  “Generous,” Walt said, like a knife.

  “Traitor’s market,” Crowfeather said, testing.

  “Stet,” Walt replied. As was. Calling him. Put up or shut up.
And with it: know your place!

  “Cousins,” Sunny said, keeping the focus, keeping the braka, the best of the old ways. The songs would always be written about the likes of Walt Senny, but it was flashmen like Sunny Jim who were the real heroes here. “Your dibs. We’ll follow you in at first light.”

  “Others coming in,” Punky said, which said it all – explained the visit, the civility. Cover our back, we cover yours. Just like the hateful, treacherous old times.

  There was hesitation. Muscles locked in the firelight though you’d never know it. There were old scores indeed, Sam and Maisie the least of them. This was make or break.

  “New threat, new start, I figure,” Sunny said, bringing what he could of decency and civilization into this strange alienized place. “We’ll ward off. Give two hours. You do the same. Split the fee.”

  “Done,” Punky said, holding out his cup for a refill instead of rising to go as they’d expected. “Half cup for the road.” And then, as if just thinking of it: “Sam, think Maisie would like a word, sotta-votchy.”

  Sam was up and walking, moving away from the fire, into ambush, into trouble, he suddenly didn’t care. He was only aware of Thomas looking after him, wondering what the hell was going on, aware of footsteps following. He walked forty paces and turned, saw the campfire back there, the mixed crews filling this lonely place in the night, as improbable as a Landing, truth be known, saw Maisie’s shadow right there, backlit.

  “Sam,” she said.

  “Mae.” He’d never called her by her given name.

  “Never expected this turn-out,” she said. “Never expected collateral damage.” Here it was. She had the right.

  “Never ever that, Mae.” All he could say. And the word “ever.” Precious envoy.

  “Put aside the Trimmers, put aside the rest.”

  “Denial gets like that.” Inane, simply true. The Sailmaker, he might have said. But she knew. Had to know. Losing Boker and Steyne, almost all of Croft Denner’s Larrikins. Despite the songs, the glamour of the chats, they’d been cruel years, even for the best crews. Especially the best.