The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  He thinks: We have made this place our hot-house.

  Rebecca says, “They hung a tyre around his neck. A tyre and a garland of unripe hops. The tyre weighed him down and the hops made him sneeze. They hopped and skipped around him, singing. Nigger. Nigger. Nigger. Tears ran down his nose.”

  These are the rhythms of a campfire tale. This is the sing-song of a story passed from mouth to mouth. Connie’s heart hammers in time to her playful, repetitious, Odysseian phrases.

  Connie recalls that Homer, being blind, had no need of books.

  He cries out in fear.

  Rebecca’s hand settles, light and dry as apple leaves, upon his breast. “What is it?”

  “I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to hear.”

  She says to him: “The ring-leader ran away in the night. They say he’s hiding near. They say he’s hiding on our land. Among the apple trees.” She says: “It’s up to you. It’s your responsibility.”

  A week, this lasts: a week of curfews, false sightings, beatings of the rush beds. At last, exhausted, Connie consults with the military authorities in Ipswich, and abandons the hunt.

  At night, with the light on, he reads.

  “Rudin spoke intelligently, passionately, and effectively; he exhibited much knowledge, a great deal of reading. No one had expected to find him a remarkable man . . . He was so indifferently dressed, so little had been heard of him. To all of them it seemed incomprehensible and strange how someone so intelligent could pop up suddenly in the provinces.”

  With eyes black-brown and bored, she says:

  “I’ve heard this part before.”

  Yes, and if he asked her, she could probably recite it to him. (He does not ask her.)

  “He spoke masterfully, and entertainingly, but not entirely lucidly . . . yet this very vagueness lent particular charm to his speech.”

  Connie wonders, dizzily, if Ivan Turgenev’s observation, sharp enough in its day, means anything at all now.

  “A listener might not understand precisely what was being talked about; but he would catch his breath, curtains would open wide before his eyes, something resplendent would burn dazzlingly ahead of him.”

  Rebecca does not know what vagueness is. She could not be vague if she tried. Her stories shine and flash like knives. He glances at her eyes. They will not close. They will not close. His bludgeon hand is numb, he is so tired. But still he reads.

  “. . . But most astounded of all were Basistov and Natalya. Basistov could scarcely draw breath; he sat all the while open-mouthed and popeyed – and listened, listened, as he had never listened to anyone in his whole life, and Natalya’s face was covered in a crimson flush and her gaze, directly fixed at Rudin, both darkened and glittered in turn . . .”

  “Tomorrow,” he says to her, when at last he can read no more, “let us go for a walk. Where would you like to go?”

  “To the banks of the Alde and the Ore,” she says, “where Hadmuhaddera’s nephew lost his shoe, and the last man in Orford once fished.”

  Deprived of records, she remembers everything as a story. Because everything is a story, she remembers everything.

  Tonight, in the dark, as he sprawls, formless and helpless beside her, she tells him a story of a beach she has heard tell of, a beach she doesn’t know, called Chesil.

  “Chesil Beach is a high shingle bank, cut free of the coast by small, brackish waters,” she says.

  “Like here,” he says.

  “Like here,” she agrees, “but the waters aren’t rivers, and the bank that parts them from the sea is much bigger, and made all of stones.”

  She tells him:

  “You could spend your whole day among the dunes and never see the sea. Yet you hear its constant stirring, endlessly, and soon in your mind comes the image of this bank, this barrow-mound, put before you like a dike, to keep the sea from roaring in upon you. The land behind you is melted and steep, and before you the pebbles grind, a vast mill, and you wonder how high the sea water is now. You wonder how high the tide comes, relative to the land. You wonder how long it will take, for the sea to eat through the bank . . .”

  In the morning, as you are eating breakfast, she comes down the stairs. She is wearing a red dress. It is a dress you recognise. It belongs to the girl you so recently left. It belongs to your mistress in Paris.

  Even her hair is arranged in the way that your mistress’s hair was arranged.

  You say nothing. How can you? You can hardly breathe.

  “Let’s go for our walk, then,” she says.

  So you go for your walk, down the track, past the gate, into lane after lane, and all around stand the apple trees, line upon line. The gravel slides wetly under your feet as you walk, and the leaves of the apple trees whisper and rattle. She scents the air, and you wonder what she finds there to smell, what symptom of weather or season or time of day. She tosses her hair in the breeze. Her hair is crunched and pinned and high, and the fold of it that you so treasured is gone, the fold of gold-brown that once hid her eye.

  Your orchards fan east to the banks of the Alde and the Ore. The rivers run wide and muddy and dark, and seabirds pick over them, combing for the blind, simple foods of the seashore.

  The rivers, slow, rich and mud-laden, evacuate themselves into each other through a maze of ditches and channels, some natural, and some cut by hand through the furze. On the far banks, where the land is too narrow for tillage, an old fenland persists, all jetties and rotten boardwalks and old broken-down walls, and everything is choked by high, concealing reeds.

  She turns away from you where you settle, shapeless in the grass. She bends, and the red dress rides up her calves, and you begin to ask her where the dress comes from, and what has she done to her hair? But all that comes out is:

  “I – I – I – ”

  She takes off her shoes.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Paddle.” She lifts the edges of her dress and unrolls her stockings, peeling them down her brown smooth legs.

  The tide is out, the mud is thick and brown like chocolate.

  “There are terrible quicksands,” you tell her, knowing that she knows.

  Absently, she traces her toe through the yielding mud.

  “If I don’t come back,” she says, “you’ll know I’m swimming.”

  “No,” you tell her, agitated. “Don’t do that! It’s dangerous. Don’t do that.”

  You stand and watch her as she walks slowly upstream, in the shallow edge of the water. Swishing her feet. When she is gone, you wander to the water’s edge, and you study the thing she has drawn in the mud.

  A line from a book comes to you: a book by Marshall McLuhan:

  Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

  When the rifle shot comes out from the reeds in the far bank, and hits you full in the chest, you do not fall. The suddenness of it seems to freeze the world, to undo the physical constraints that hold you and your kind and her kind and all kinds to worlds that are never quite alien, never quite home.

  You do not even stagger.

  You stand, watching old abandoned windmills, listening to the rushes, their susurration clear against rustling of the leaves of the apple trees. You watch the distant figure with the rifle leap from cover behind an old ruined wall and disappear between the reeds.

  You choke, and fall backwards. As you lie there, she comes running.

  She has taken off the red dress. She has let down her hair. You follow the line of it, and find that it has returned to itself, a fold of gold-brown over one eye. Terrified, you follow the fold of her hair to her neck, to her breast. Blood bubbles in your throat as you try to speak.

  She puts her arms about you, holding you upright for a few seconds longer. “Try not to move,” she says. She is crying in the soft, calm manner of her people.

  When your eyes close, she begins to sing. “I hate you,” she sings. “I hate you. Oh, how I hate you
!”

  Singing, or weeping. You cannot tell the difference.

  You come from too far away.

  THE TWO DICKS

  Paul McAuley

  Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984, and has gone on to be a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Skylife, The Third Alternative, When the Music’s Over and elsewhere.

  McAuley is considered to be one of the best of the new breed of British writers (although a few Australian writers could fit under this heading as well) who are producing that brand of rigorous hard science fiction with updated modern and stylistic sensibilities that is sometimes referred to as “radical hard science fiction,” but he also writes Dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future, and he is also one of the major young writers who are producing that revamped and retooled widescreen Space Opera that has sometimes been called the New Baroque Space Opera, reminiscent of the Superscience stories of the ’30s taken to an even higher level of intensity and scale. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award, and his acclaimed novel Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 1996. His other books include the novels Of the Fall Eternal Light, Pasquale’s Angel, Confluence (a major trilogy of ambitious scope and scale set ten million years in the future, comprised of the novels Child of the River, Ancient of Days, and Shrine of Stars), and Life on Mars. His short fiction has been collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories and The Invisible Country and he is the coeditor, with Kim Newman, of an original anthology, In Dreams. His most recent books are two novels, The Secret of Life and Whole Wide World.

  Here he offers us a sly look at the life of SF writer Philip K. Dick in a universe where things turned out just a little different.

  PHIL IS FLYING. He is in the air, and he is flying. His head full of paranoia blues, the Fear beating around him like black wings as he is borne above America.

  The revelation came to him that morning. He can time it exactly: 0948, March 20, 1974. He was doing his program of exercises as recommended by his personal trainer, Mahler blasting out of the top-of-the-line stereo in the little gym he’d had made from the fifth bedroom. And in the middle of his second set of situps something goes off in his head. A terrifically bright soundless explosion of clear white light.

  He’s been having flashes – phosphene afterimages, blank moments of calm in his day – for about a month now, but this is the spiritual equivalent of a hydrogen bomb. His first thought is that it is a stroke. That his high blood pressure has finally killed him. But apart from a mild headache he feels perfectly fine. More than fine, in fact. Alert and fully awake and filled with a great calm.

  It’s as if something took control of me a long time ago, he thinks. As if something put the real me to sleep and allowed a constructed personality to carry on my life, and now, suddenly, I’m fully awake again. The orthomolecular vitamin diet, perhaps that did it, perhaps it really did heighten synchronous firing of the two hemispheres of my brain. I’m awake, and I’m ready to put everything in order. And without any help, he thinks. Without Emmet or Mike. That’s important.

  By this time he is standing at the tall window, looking down at the manicured lawn that runs out from the terrace to the shaggy hedge of flowering bougainvillaea, the twisty shapes of the cypresses. The Los Angeles sky pure and blue, washed clean by that night’s rain, slashed by three white contrails to make a leaning A.

  A for affirmation, perhaps. Or A for act.

  The first thing, he thinks, because he thinks about it every two or three hours, because it has enraged him ever since Emmet told him about it, the very first thing I have to do is deal with the people who stole my book.

  A week ago, perhaps inspired by a precursor of the clear white flash, Phil tried to get hold of a narcotics agent badge, and after a long chain of phone calls managed to get through to John Finlator, the deputy narcotics director, who advised Phil to go straight to the top. And he’d been right, Phil thinks now. If I want a fed badge, I have to get it from the Man. Get sworn in or whatever. Initiated. Then deal with the book pirates and those thought criminals in the SFWA, show them what happens when you steal a real writer’s book.

  It all seemed so simple in the afterglow of revelation, but Phil begins to have his first misgivings less than an hour later, in the taxi to LAX. Not about the feeling of clarity and the sudden energy it has given him, but about whether he is making the best use of it. There are things he’s forgotten, like unformed words on the tip of his tongue. Things he needs to deal with, but he can’t remember what they are.

  He is still worrying at this, waiting in line at the check-in desk, when this bum appears right in front of him, and thrusts what seems like an unraveling baseball under Phil’s nose.

  It is a copy of the pirated novel: Phil’s simmering anger reignites, and burns away every doubt.

  It is a cheap paperback printed by some backstreet outfit in South Korea, the thin absorbent paper grainy with wood specks, a smudged picture of a castle silhouetted against the Japanese flag on the cover, his name far bigger than the title, Someone stole a copy of Phil’s manuscript, the one he agreed to shelve, the one his publishers paid handsomely not to publish in one of those tricky deals Emmet is so good at. And some crook, it still isn’t completely clear who, published this cheap completely illegal edition. Emmet told Phil about it a month ago, and Phil’s publishers moved swiftly to get an injunction against its sale anywhere in the USA. But thousands of copies are in circulation anyway, smuggled into the country and sold clandestinely.

  And the SFWA, Phil thinks, the Science Fiction Writers of America, Emmet is so right about them, the Swine Fucking Whores of Amerika, they may deny that they have anything to do with the pirate edition, but their bleatings about censorship and their insidious promotion of this blatant violation of my copyright proves they want to drag me down to their level.

  Me: the greatest living American novelist. Erich Segal called me that only last month in a piece in The New York Review of Books; Updike joshed me about it during the round of golf we played the day after I gave that speech at Harvard. The greatest living American novelist: of course the SFWA want to claim me for their own propaganda purposes, to pump my life’s blood into their dying little genre.

  And now this creature has materialized before Phil, like some early version or failed species of human being, with blond hair tangled over his shoulders, a handlebar mustache, dressed in a buckskin jacket and faded blue jeans like Hollywood’s idea of an Indian scout, a guitar slung over his shoulder, fraying black sneakers, or no, those were his feet, bare feet so filthy they looked like busted shoes. And smelling of pot smoke and powerful sweat. This aborigine, this indigent, his hand thrust toward Phil, and a copy of the stolen novel in that hand, as he says, “I love this book, man. It tells it like it is. The little men, man, that’s who count, right? Little men, man, like you and me. So could you like sign this for me if it’s no hassle . . .”

  And Phil is seized by righteous anger and great wrath, and he smites his enemy right there, by the American Airlines First Class check-in desk. Or at least he grabs the book and tears it in half – the broken spine yielding easily, almost gratefully – and tells the bum to fuck off. Oh, just imagine the scene, the bum whining about his book, his property, and Phil telling the creature he doesn’t deserve to read any of his books, he is banned for life from reading his books, and two security guards coming and hustling the bum away amid apologies to the Great American Novelist. The bum doesn’t go quietly. He screams and struggles, yells that he, Phil, is a fake, a sell-out, man, the guitar clanging and chirping like a mocking grasshopper as he is wrestled away between the two burly, beetling guards.

  Phil has to take a couple of Ritalin pills to calm down. To calm his blood down. Th
en a couple of uppers so he can face the journey.

  He still has the book. Torn in half, pages frazzled by reading and rereading slipping out of it every time he opens it, so that he has to spend some considerable time sorting them into some kind of order, like a conjuror gripped by stage flop sweat in the middle of a card trick, before he can even contemplate looking at it.

  Emmet said it all. What kind of commie fag organization would try to blast Phil’s reputation with this cheap shot fired under radar? Circulating it on the campuses of America, poisoning the young minds who should be drinking deep clear drafts of his prose. Not this . . . this piece of dreck.

  The Man in the High Castle. A story about an author locked in the castle of his reputation, a thinly disguised parable about his own situation, set in a parallel or alternate history where the U.S.A. lost the war and was split into two, the East governed by the Nazis, the West by the Japanese. A trifle, a silly fantasy. What had he been thinking when he wrote it? Emmet was furious when Phil sent him the manuscript. He wasted no words in telling Phil how badly he had fucked up, asking him bluntly, what the hell did he think he was doing, wasting his time with this lame sci-fi crap?

  Phil had been stuck, that’s what. And he’s still stuck. Ten, fifteen years of writing and rewriting, two marriages made and broken while Phil works on and on at the same book, moving farther and farther away from his original idea, so far out now he thinks he might never get back. The monster doesn’t even have a title. The Long Awaited. The Brilliant New. The Great Unfinished. Whatever. And in the midst of this mire, Phil set aside the Next Great Novel and pulled a dusty idea from his files – dating back to 1961, for Chrissake – and something clicked. He wrote it straight out, a return to the old days of churning out sci-fi stories for tiny amounts of money while righteously high on speed: cranked up, cranking out the pages. For a little while he was so happy: just the idea of finishing something made him happy. But Emmet made him see the error of his ways. Made him see that you can’t go back and start over. Made him see the depth of his error, the terrible waste of his energy and his talent.