The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  “Here’s the problem,” the savant said unexpectedly. He poked at the interior of the modem. “There was a wire loose.”

  He jacked the device into the wall.

  “Oh, dear God,” Darger said.

  A savage look of raw delight filled the dwarf savant’s face, and he seemed to swell before them.

  “I am free!” he cried in a voice so loud it seemed impossible that it could arise from such a slight source. He shook as if an enormous electrical current were surging through him. The stench of ozone filled the room.

  He burst into flames and advanced on the English spy-master and her brother.

  While all stood aghast and paralyzed, Darger seized Surplus by the collar and hauled him out into the hallway, slamming the door shut as he did.

  They had not run twenty paces down the hall when the door to the Office of Protocol exploded outward, sending flaming splinters of wood down the hallway.

  Satanic laughter boomed behind them.

  Glancing over his shoulder, Darger saw the burning dwarf, now blackened to a cinder, emerge from a room engulfed in flames, capering and dancing. The modem, though disconnected, was now tucked under one arm, as if it were exceedingly valuable to him. His eyes were round and white and lidless. Seeing them, he gave chase.

  “Aubrey!” Surplus cried. “We are headed the wrong way!”

  It was true. They were running deeper into the Labyrinth, toward its heart, rather than outward. But it was impossible to turn back now. They plunged through scattering crowds of nobles and servitors, trailing fire and supernatural terror in their wake.

  The scampering grotesque set fire to the carpets with every footfall. A wave of flame tracked him down the hall, incinerating tapestries and wallpaper and wood trim. No matter how they dodged, it ran straight toward them. Clearly, in the programmatic literalness of its kind, the demon from the web had determined that having early seen them, it must early kill them as well.

  Darger and Surplus raced through dining rooms and salons, along balconies and down servants’ passages. To no avail. Dogged by their hyper-natural nemesis, they found themselves running down a passage, straight toward two massive bronze doors, one of which had been left just barely ajar. So fearful were they that they hardly noticed the guards.

  “Hold, sirs!”

  The mustachioed master of apes stood before the doorway, his baboons straining against their leashes. His eyes widened with recognition. “By gad, it’s you!” he cried in astonishment.

  “Lemme kill ’em!” one of the baboons cried. “The lousy bastards!” The others growled agreement.

  Surplus would have tried to reason with them, but when he started to slow his pace, Darger put a broad hand on his back and shoved. “Dive!” he commanded. So of necessity the dog of rationality had to bow to the man of action. He tobogganed wildly across the polished marble floor between two baboons, straight at the master of apes, and then between his legs.

  The man stumbled, dropping the leashes as he did.

  The baboons screamed and attacked.

  For an instant, all five apes were upon Darger, seizing his limbs, snapping at his face and neck. Then the burning dwarf arrived, and, finding his target obstructed, seized the nearest baboon. The animal shrieked as its uniform burst into flames.

  As one, the other baboons abandoned their original quarry to fight this newcomer who had dared attack one of their own.

  In a trice, Darger leaped over the fallen master of apes, and was through the door. He and Surplus threw their shoulders against its metal surface and pushed. He had one brief glimpse of the fight, with the baboons aflame, and their master’s body flying through the air. Then the door slammed shut. Internal bars and bolts, operated by smoothly oiled mechanisms, automatically latched themselves.

  For the moment, they were safe.

  Surplus slumped against the smooth bronze, and wearily asked, “Where did you get that modem?”

  “From a dealer of antiquities.” Darger wiped his brow with his kerchief. “It was transparently worthless. Whoever would dream it could be repaired?”

  Outside, the screaming ceased. There was a very brief silence. Then the creature flung itself against one of the metal doors. It rang with the impact.

  A delicate girlish voice wearily said, “What is this noise?”

  They turned in surprise and found themselves looking up at the enormous corpus of Queen Gloriana. She lay upon her pallet, swaddled in satin and lace, and abandoned by all, save her valiant (though doomed) guardian apes. A pervasive yeasty smell emanated from her flesh. Within the tremendous folds of chins by the dozens and scores was a small human face. Its mouth moved delicately and asked, “What is trying to get in?”

  The door rang again. One of its great hinges gave.

  Darger bowed. “I fear, madame, it is your death.”

  “Indeed?” Blue eyes opened wide and, unexpectedly, Gloriana laughed. “If so, that is excellent good news. I have been praying for death an extremely long time.”

  “Can any of God’s creations truly pray for death and mean it?” asked Darger, who had his philosophical side. “I have known unhappiness myself, yet even so life is precious to me.”

  “Look at me!” Far up to one side of the body, a tiny arm – though truly no tinier than any woman’s arm – waved feebly. “I am not God’s creation, but Man’s. Who would trade ten minutes of their own life for a century of mine? Who, having mine, would not trade it all for death?”

  A second hinge popped. The doors began to shiver. Their metal surfaces radiated heat.

  “Darger, we must leave!” Surplus cried. “There is a time for learned conversation, but it is not now.”

  “Your friend is right,” Gloriana said. “There is a small archway hidden behind yon tapestry. Go through it. Place your hand on the left wall and run. If you turn whichever way you must to keep from letting go of the wall, it will lead you outside. You are both rogues, I see, and doubtless deserve punishment, yet I can find nothing in my heart for you but friendship.”

  “Madame . . .” Darger began, deeply moved.

  “Go! My bridegroom enters.”

  The door began to fall inward. With a final cry of “Farewell!” from Darger and “Come on!” from Surplus, they sped away.

  By the time they had found their way outside, all of Buckingham Labyrinth was in flames. The demon, however, did not emerge from the flames, encouraging them to believe that when the modem it carried finally melted down, it had been forced to return to that unholy realm from whence it came.

  The sky was red with flames as the sloop set sail for Calais. Leaning against the rail, watching, Surplus shook his head. “What a terrible sight! I cannot help feeling, in part, responsible.”

  “Come! Come!” Darger said. “This dyspepsia ill becomes you. We are both rich fellows, now! The Lady Pamela’s diamonds will maintain us lavishly for years to come. As for London, this is far from the first fire it has had to endure. Nor will it be the last. Life is short, and so, while we live, let us be jolly!”

  “These are strange words for a melancholiac,” Surplus said wonderingly.

  “In triumph, my mind turns its face to the sun. Dwell not on the past, dear friend, but on the future that lies glittering before us.”

  “The necklace is worthless,” Surplus said. “Now that I have the leisure to examine it, free of the distracting flesh of Lady Pamela, I see that these are not diamonds, but mere imitations.” He made to cast the necklace into the Thames.

  Before he could, though, Darger snatched away the stones from him and studied them closely. Then he threw back his head and laughed. “The biters bit! Well, it may be paste, but it looks valuable still. We shall find good use for it in Paris.”

  “We are going to Paris?”

  “We are partners, are we not? Remember that antique wisdom that whenever a door closes, another opens? For every city that burns, another beckons. To France, then, and adventure! After which, Italy, the Vatican Empire, Austro-
Hungary, perhaps even Russia! Never forget that you have yet to present your credentials to the Duke of Muscovy.”

  “Very well,” Surplus said. “But when we do, I’ll pick out the modem.”

  THE CHIEF DESIGNER

  Andy Duncan

  Andy Duncan made his first sale to Asimov’s Science Fiction in 1997 and quickly made others, to Starlight, Sci Fiction, Amazing, Science Fiction Age, Dying For it, Realms of Fantasy, and Weird Tales, as well as several more sales to Asimov’s. By the beginning of the new century, he was widely recognized as one of the most individual, quirky, and flavorful new voices on the scene today. His story “The Executioner’s Guild” was on both the final Nebula ballot and the final ballot for the World Fantasy Award in 2000. In 2001, he won two World Fantasy Awards for his story “The Pottawatomie Giant,” and for his landmark first collection, Beluthahatchie and Other Stories. A graduate of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop in Seattle, he was born in Batesberg, South Carolina, and now lives in Northport, Alabama, with his new bride, Sydney.

  In the moving, thoughtful, powerful novella that follows, he takes us back to the Soviet Union in the days just after World War II for a glimpse of the kind of secret history that doesn’t get told in schoolbooks – a penetrating, fact-based look into the strange life and stranger destiny of a man whose life changed the history of the twentieth century, and perhaps the history of the future, forever.

  I. KOLYMA LABOR CAMP, SOMETIME DURING WORLD WAR II

  “KOROLEV.”

  D 327 did not look around. He was busy. His joints grated together, his ligaments groaned as he lifted the pickax over his head – a motion as fast as he could manage, yet so terribly slow, slower even than the last time, which had been slower in turn than the time before that; then he released his breath and with it the tension, and the will, so that his arms fell forward and allowed the tip of the pick to glance across the jagged face of the wall. A few greasy-black chips pattered his shoes. The fall of the pick almost balanced in joy the inevitable ordeal of lifting, but not quite, so D 327’s misery accumulated in minute increments like the drift of slag in which he stood ankle-deep. He knew that none of the other workers, spaced five paces apart down the length of the tunnel, were faring any better. They had been ordered to dig for gold, but he knew this tunnel held no gold; this tunnel was the antithesis of gold; the gold had been pried from its workers’ teeth and chased from their dreams; and his pick was as soft and blunt as a thumb. He raised it again, and tried to lose count of how many times he had done so.

  “Korolev.”

  D 327 tried to focus his attention not on the lift and fall, lift and fall of his triple burden, arm and pick and arm, but on the slight added weight in his right jacket pocket – an imagined weight, really, so coarse and mostly air was the bit of bread he had palmed from poor Vasily’s plate at midday. Vasily had collapsed at just the right time. Later, and Vasily would have used that crust to swipe even the shine of food from the tin plate, would have thrust it into his mouth with his last dying breath. Sooner, and the guard would have noticed the remaining food and snatched it away. Guards starved less quickly in the Kolyma than the prisoners, but all starved. A dozen times D 327 had come deliriously close to eating his prize, but each time he had refrained. Many of his fellow prisoners had forgotten how to savor, but he had not. After supper would be best: Just before sleep, as he lay with his face to the barracks wall, the unchewed food in his mouth would add warmth and flavor to oblivion.

  “Korolev.”

  The voice was cold and clear and patient, an electronic pulse against the rasps, clinks, drips, and scuttles of the tunnel. What word, in this hole, could bear such repetition? Only a name, like God, or Stalin.

  “Korolev.”

  I heard that name often at the Institute, D 327 thought. Often in my presence others said that name. A response was expected, assumed; was only just. Down fell the pick, clatter and flake; he turned, half afraid of seeing nothing in the light of his carbide lamp.

  Instead he faced an infinitude of stars.

  “Come down from your orbit, Comrade Korolev. Come down to Earth, that a mere mortal may speak with you.”

  The stars were printed on a sheet of glossy paper: a page. A hand turned the page, to a cutaway diagram of a tapered cylinder like a plump bullet. Inside its shell flowed rivers of arrows. At that moment, more clearly even than he remembered his own name, Sergei Korolev remembered another’s.

  “Tsiolkovsky,” he said.

  “Your memory is excellent, Comrade Korolev.” The man who had held the open book before Korolev’s face reversed it and examined it himself. He wore a full-dress officer’s uniform, and two soldiers flanked him. “Exploration of Cosmic Space with Reactive Devices, by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Published 1903. And did the czar recognize his genius? Fah! If not for the Workers’ Revolution, he would have died of old age still wiping the snot of schoolboys in Kaluga.” He sighed. “How often we visionaries labor without recognition, without thanks.”

  “It is a shame, Citizen General. I am sad for you.”

  The officer snapped the book shut one-handed. In the dim light of Korolev’s helmet gleamed the brim of the officer’s cap, the golden eagle’s wings, and the rifle barrels of the soldiers on each side. “You flatter me, Korolev. I am only an engineer like yourself. And henceforth you may call me Comrade Shandarin, as you would have before your crimes were exposed and punished.” He surveyed the meager rubble beneath Korolev’s feet. “Your service here is done. From today you serve the Motherland in other ways. You will join me in my work.”

  Korolev was not attentive. Just as the mere sight of food could flood his mouth with saliva and his stomach with growling, raging juices, the glimpse of Tsiolkovsky’s diagrams had released a torrent of images, facts, numerals, terms, all familiar and yet deliciously new. Apogee and perigee. Trajectory and throttle. Elevation and azimuth. Velocities and propellants and thrust. He was trying to savor all this, and this man Shandarin was distracting him. “And what work is that – Comrade?”

  Shandarin laughed, a series of sharp detonations in the tunnel. “Why, what a question. The work your Motherland trained you to do, of course. Do you think your skills as a gold miner are in demand?” He reached into his brass-buttoned coat (and one part of Korolev, eternally cold in his thin and tattered parka, noted how the coat retained the smooth, unwrinkled drape of great comfort and thickness and weight) and pulled out a folded sheaf of papers that he handed to Korolev. “The chief problem,” he said, as Korolev exulted in the glorious feel of paper, “is distance, of course. The German rockets have a range of hundreds of kilometers, but are thousands of kilometers possible? Not all the Motherland’s enemies are her neighbors. The V-2 achieves altitudes greater than eighty kilometers, more than sixteen times the height of your GIRD-X; our new rockets must fly even higher than the Germans’.” Korolev leafed through the papers. His blisters smeared the charts and graphs no matter how much care he took. Shandarin continued: “So our rockets must somehow better the Germans’ twenty-five thousand kilograms of thrust, and by a wide margin at that. This requires drastic innovations in metallurgy or design, if not both – Comrade, are you listening?”

  Korolev had turned one of the charts on its side, so that the rocket’s arc swept not from right to left, but upward in a languid, powerful semicircle, as if bound for . . .

  His thumb left a red star in its path.

  “I am listening,” Korolev said, “and so is everyone else.” He was aware of fewer noises, fewer motions, from the other miners, and some of the Institute’s concern for security had returned to him, along with an echo of his voice of command. “In my day,” Korolev continued, “such talk was classified.”

  Shandarin shrugged, grinned. “I am speaking only to you, Comrade,” he said. He inclined his head backward, toward the soldiers, and said, “We may speak freely before cretins,” then flicked a gloved finger toward the miners, “and even more so before dead men.” He slid a page from Korol
ev’s hands and held it up for all to see, turned completely around, waved the sheet a little so that it fluttered. No miner met his gaze. He turned back to Korolev. “Shall we go?” He feigned a shiver. “I am not so used to the cold as you.”

  In 1933, after the GIRD-X triumph, after the vodka and the toasts and the ritual congratulations from Comrade Stalin (delivered in great haste by a nearsighted bureaucrat who looked as if he expected rockets to roar out of the doorways at any moment), Korolev and his mentor Tsander, who would die so soon thereafter, had left their joyous colleagues downstairs and taken their celebration aloft, clambered onto the steep, icy rooftop of the Moscow office building that housed the State Reaction Scientific Research Institute. To hell with the vodka; they toasted each other, and the rocket, and the city, and the planet, with a smuggled and hoarded bottle of French champagne.

  “To the moon!”

  “To the sun!”

  “To Mars!”

  They ate caviar and crabmeat and smoked herring, smacked like gourmands and sailed the empty cans into orbit over the frozen streets of the capital. Never, not even in the Kolyma, had Korolev so relished a meal.

  He remembered all this, and much more, as he sat beside Shandarin in the sledge that hissed away from the snow-covered entrance of Mine Seventeen. He burned to examine the papers, but they could wait. He folded them and tucked them into his worn and patched jacket, through which he almost could have read them had he wanted to. As Shandarin regarded him in silence, he pulled the crust of bread from his pocket and began nibbling it with obvious relish, as if it were the finest delicacy plucked from the ovens of the Romanovs. He settled back, closed his eyes, and in eating the bread relived the bursting tang of the caviar, the transcendent release of the launch, the blanketing embrace of the night sky that no longer danced beyond reach. In this way he communed with his former self, who dropped gently down from the rooftop of the Institute and joined him, ready to resume their great work, and the sledge shot across the snow as if propelled by yearning and fire.