The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Yama embaced him. “Take care, my old friend, and kill that fucking virgin.”

  An instant later the techs had helped Stef into the wormholer and closed the heavy door, which looked like a nine-petal steel chrysanthemum. Yama stepped back, wiping his eyes. Kathmann had now arrived to observe the action and Yama joined him.

  “Well, that’s one less friend I got,” said Yama. “This job of mine is hell. How are the preparations going for your assassination team?”

  “As fast as possible. Of course they’re the ones who’ll really do the job.”

  “There’s a chance that Steffens might pull it off alone.”

  “Yeah,” said Kathmann, “and there’s a chance I might be the next Solar System Controller. Svidanye,” he added, “see you later. Some more members of Crux have been arrested and I got work to do in the Chamber.”

  In The Wormholer, seated as he had been instructed, knees drawn up, chin down, arms around his shins, sweltering in the heavy coat, feeling the pistol grate against his ribs, Stef tried to imagine Dzhun’s face, but found that it, like everything else, was inadequate to explain to him why he was where he was. The excitement he’d felt earlier was gone, replaced by mere dread. He could only suppose that his entire life had been leading up to one moment of supreme folly, and this was it.

  Then a great violet-white light flashed through him, he felt an instant of supernatural cold, and he was sitting on a gritty sidewalk against a damp stuccoed wall.

  He raised his face. The day was overcast, and a restless throng of thick-bodied people wrapped up against the autumn chill hurried past, not one of them paying him the slightest heed.

  He looked higher. Behind the solid walls of elderly, three-story buildings with flaking plaster and paint he saw high polished towers of what looked like mirror duroplast. Immense crimson letters hovered just below the lowest layer of murk.

  Since Alspeke was written mostly in cyrillic letters, he had no trouble reading Moskovskaya a Fondovaya Birzha, and when he murmured it aloud a soft atonal voice in his ear translated: Moscow Stock Exchange. Below the Stock Exchange sign was a huge blue banner saying “1991-2091.”

  Slowly he got to his feet, staggered, caught himself against the wall. A pretty young woman paused, stared at him, then drew a pale furry hood around her face and hurried on.

  A couple of teenagers stopped also, looked at him and grinned. They squawked to each other in seabirds’ voices.

  “What’s this asshole dressed up for?”

  “Must think he’s Stalin or something. Hey, asshole—where’d you get that coat?”

  A stout woman stopped suddenly and shook her fist at the kids.

  “You leave that man alone! Can’t you see he’s crazy? He’s got troubles enough without you hooligans pestering him.”

  A little man in a checkered coat stopped and joined her.

  “Show some respect!” he shouted at the kids.

  “What, for a guy dressed up like Stalin, for Christ’s sake? Hey you,” said a teenager to Stef. “You going to a party?”

  Unfortunately, the translator didn’t answer questions, and Stef just stared at him.

  “My God, he’s deaf and dumb, and you’re harassing him,” said the woman in scandalized tones.

  By now a little crowd had gathered. Everybody had an opinion. It was the adults against the teenagers.

  “You little bastards got no respect for anybody!”

  “Not for you, Grandaddy.”

  “Call me Grandaddy? Yes, I’ve got grandchildren, but thank God they’re nothing like you, you little pimp.”

  In the confusion, Stef managed to slip away, leaving them arguing behind him. In an alleyway he unbuttoned the coat and stared down at the tunic and coarse trousers jammed into boots. The clothes were nothing like what people were wearing on the street. Already the stiff, kneehigh boots of faux leather were beginning to chafe his toes, and he hadn’t walked more than a hundred meters.

  Cursing Yang, he tried to decide what to do. While he pondered, he worked his way from alleyway to alleyway until he suddenly spotted, among the hundreds of small shops lining the street—Boris Yeltsin Street—a shop with a sign that said Kostyumi. He didn’t need the translator for that.

  Thirty minutes later, Stef emerged from the costume shop wearing acceptable clothes, short soft boots, baggy trousers, a faux astrakhan hat, a long warm padded jacket. In his pockets were thirty ten-ruble notes, the difference between the value of the handsome and practically new theatrical garb he’d sold the shop’s owner and that of the secondhand, ill-fitting stuff he’d bought from him.

  He slipped into the crowd, which was denser than the center of Ulanor on Great Genghis Day. The street traffic was noisy and thick, everybody driving headlong as if their odd, smelly cars were assaulting a position. Above, the air traffic was thin, almost absent—a few primitive rotary-wing machines with shapes so bizarre that Stef thought at first that they were some sort of giant insect life. Jet trails streaked far above, making him wonder if airpackets already flew from Luna.

  Between street and sky, strung on cables, hundreds of blue banners fluttered, all saying 1991-2091, and sometimes “100 Years of the Democratic Republic,” whatever that meant. He could see no mention of Tsar Stalin the Good.

  His next stop was in front of a huge window filled with flickering mashini. Stef was surprised to see that the images made by the boxes were three-dimensional—he had expected something less advanced—though the technology was crude, merely a rough illusion created on a flat screen. His eyes roved past a ballet and half a dozen sports programs. Russian futbol teams had dominated world play in the season just past, but what would the hockey season bring forth? Young people dashed around on grass or ice while the announcer talked.

  Nobody at all seemed to be thinking about the danger of universal destruction. Stef shook his head, amazed at the ordinariness of this world, so close to its end. He moved along, jostling against these people who would soon be dust and ashes, astonished at their solidity and their obvious confidence that they would exist for a long time to come.

  A single screen was tuned to a news program called Vremya and he stopped to watch it. A young woman wearing a fantastic pile of yellow hair spoke of the Russian-led international team now hard at work establishing the Martian colony and the problems it was facing. People on Mars, needing to communicate despite a babel of tongues, were developing a jargon all their own; the American members of the colony called it All-Speak. It was mostly Russian and English, with a flavoring of words from twenty other languages.

  Meanwhile a new condominium development on Luna marked the transformation of that spartan base, barely seventy years old, into a genuine city, the first on another world. Space had never looked better; Russia’s own program, after a long eclipse, again led the world. Here on Earth things were not so encouraging. There were new outbreaks of Blue Nile hemorrhagic fever. The Nine-Years’ War continued in the Rocky Mountains; the weak U.S. central government seemed unable to conquer the rebels, and United Nations peacekeepers had again been massacred in Montana.

  But the big worry was that border tensions continued to mount in Mongolia, where Chinese forces had occupied Ulan Bator. The name cause Stef to press his nose against the glass. He had heard enough of Yang’s lecture to know that Ulan Bator was the origin of the name Ulanor, even though the city the announcer was talking about was now—now?—nothing more than a mound on the green forested banks of the River Tuul.

  According to Yang, a few survivors of the Troubles had trekked northward, bringing the name with them and applying it to a cluster of yurts in an endless snowstorm. Later, because it had low background radiation, the place had become the site of the Worldcity—a strange fate for a Mongol encampment that had survived the Two Year Winter for no better reason than the sheer unkillable toughness of its people and an endless supply of frozen yak meat, which they had softened by sleeping on it and eaten raw for lack of firewood.

  Another name caug
ht Stef’s attention. “Defense Minister Razumovsky has declared that Russia, together with its European and American allies, will stand firm against further aggression by the Imperial People’s Republic of China.”

  Defense Minister Razumovsky? That wasn’t the word he had learned, the name of the man Dyeva was supposed to kill. It was another Raz word, Raz, raz—Razruzhenye.

  He must have said the word aloud without meaning to, for his translator murmured, “Destruction.”

  Stef nodded. Sure. In the folk memory, Minister Razumovsky became Minister Razruzhenye, Minister Destruction. The name was wrong, but the tradition might still be correct.

  Razumovsky suddenly appeared in a clip. He had a wide, flat face like a frog someone had stepped on. He seemed to talk with his right fist as much as his mouth, pounding on a podium while he spoke of Russia’s sacred borders and of China’s presumption, now that it had conquered Korea and Japan, that all East Asia belonged to the Dragon Republic.

  “They’ll find out different if they mess with us!” Razumovsky bawled, and loud cheering broke out among a crowd seated in something called the Duma. “They think they can threaten us with their rockets, but our Automated Space Defense System is the most advanced in the world. I spit upon their threats!” More cheering.

  Then a weighty, white-maned man came on, identified as President Rostoff. His message was of conciliation and peace. “As the leader of the Western Alliance, Russia bears a grave responsibility to act with all due caution. Our guard is up, but we extend as well the hand of friendship to our Chinese brothers and sisters.”

  Stef smiled; across the centuries, he recognized without difficulty the ancient game of good cop-bad cop. He moved on, meditating on a final line from the announcer: that the debate on the Mongolian situation would continue in the Duma tonight, and that the President and the cabinet would again be present. Was that why Dyeva had picked this particular day to return to the past?

  He walked down a gentle declivity where the street widened into an avenue called Great Polyanka and rose to the marble pylons of a new gleaming bridge. Beyond a small river he saw red walls, gold onion domes, palaces of white stone—the Kremlin.

  Pleasure boats with glass roofs slid lazily along the river, which was divided here by a long island. In the boats Stef could see brightly dressed people dancing. Then the crowd swept him onto the other bank, past the Aleksandrovsky Gardens and up a gentle rise. Here the throng divided; most people passed on, but some joined a long queue that had formed at a brick gatehouse.

  Stef continued with the majority along the autumnal garden and the crenellated wall into Red Square. He stared like any tourist at a cathedral like a kif-head’s dream and then, feeling tired and hungry, crossed the square and drifted into the archways of a huge building that filled the far side, a market of some sort crowded with shops and loudly bargaining people. At a stall that sold writing paper, Stef bought a small notebook, an envelope, and an object he had never seen before—a pen that emitted ink.

  The building held eating places, too. Hungrily, Stef found himself a place at a small table in one of them and ordered shchi without knowing what cabbage was. Soon a bowl of hot greenish soup lay steaming before him, along with a sliced onion and a chunk of dense and delicious brown bread and sweet butter. It was the first time he’d ever tasted butter from a cow, since all the Earth’s cattle had died in the Troubles. It had a subtle, complex flavor and an unctuous texture quite different from the manufactured stuff he knew.

  He devoured it all, licked his fingers as the other diners were doing, and paid with a few of his rubles. Then, still sitting at the table, he laboriously wrote a few lines, tore out the page, and sealed it in an envelope which he addressed to Xian in care of Yama. He left the eating place smiling grimly; in case something went wrong, this note was another legacy he hoped to leave behind him.

  He returned to Red Square to find that in his absence it had become almost unbearably beautiful. A light autumn snow had begun to fall, streetlights were coming on, and the bizarre cathedral of St. Basil floated in its own illumination, more than ever a dream.

  Shadows, light and snow turned everything to magic. Strolling past were young people with faces as white and pink as dawn clouds, and among them stout men in astrakahns and elegant women in faux ermine. Old women were selling apples that could have been plucked from their own cheeks.

  A little band began to play somewhere as Stef slowly retraced his steps, out of the square and up to a floodlit gate in the Kremlin wall. People were streaming in, all talking excitedly, and Stef followed.

  Inside, he moved with difficulty through the throng gathering at a big, anonymous new building with the words DUMA OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE in gold letters above the doors. Guards in hats of faux fur were trying to keep a roadway open here, pushing people back but, to Stef’s surprise, using no whips. Considering what he had always heard about the Tsars, the mildness of this government was astonishing. He circled the crowd, his mind now centered on Dyeva’s hologram, searching faces of which there seemed no end, countless faces, all different, none hers.

  Away from the Duma the Kremlin grounds were more open. In the last light, huge rooks wearing gray patches on their wings like shawls flew from one bare tree to another, cawing their complaints about the human invasion. Stef wandered into a small church like a glittering lacquered box. Gold-haloed saints ascended every wall and hung suspended in the red depths of the ceiling; ghostly notes of song showered down, although he could see nobody singing.

  People knelt, prayed or simply stood and looked on. An old woman rose, crossed herself, and jostled Stef on her way out. Another and younger woman wearing a fur hat and a long coat rose and turned to go. Either Dyeva or her twin sister passed so close to Stef that he could have touched her.

  After a stunned instant of surprise he followed, out into the dry fresh-falling snow, the lights and shadows of dusk. The rooks had settled into their nests. She didn’t walk, she strode, eyes straight ahead. He followed her along a winding path, keeping one or two people between them. He was looking for a place to kill her, a dark corner, a moment of privacy.

  Then he realized that he didn’t need privacy. Left hand on the red button of the transponder, he gripped his weapon with his right, raising the barrel a little in his coat pocket. He would kill her in the open and escape where nobody could follow. He only had to make absolutely sure that this was his quarry. He stepped off the path, the dry snow crunched under his boots, he hastened, he was directly behind her.

  She had stopped to watch a wedding party ending a day’s celebration here in the Kremlin at dusk. Holding wine glasses were a pretty girl in voluminous white, her new husband in an uncomfortable-looking suit of black, and half a dozen friends. One of the friends stepped forward with a bottle of bubbling wine and filled their glasses. Everyone was laughing. They had picked up a street musician someplace, an old man with a primitive instrument of some sort that he crushed and stretched between his hands. He played wheezy music and the young people toasted the couple while onlookers clapped, laughed and wept.

  “Dyeva,” said Stef and she turned her head and looked at him.

  Unquestionably it was the Tartar face he knew so well, with the high cheekbones and the angled eyes. Her face didn’t change, yet she knew instantly why he had come. Instead of pleading for her life, she said in Alspeke, in a low, urgent voice:

  “Look at them! Look at them! Look at this world. Can you really let it destroy itself to save what we have—tyrants, fools, Darksiders, the White Chamber? These people are alive, they’re free, they deserve to have a future. Whoever you are, take just one second before you kill me. Think about it!”

  And for a lengthening instant Stef did. In fact, he had been thinking about it secretly for hours. To be here, now, seeing these people, this world—it wasn’t theory anymore. Uncounted millions lived and breathed and wanted to keep on doing so. His own world seemed remote and for the moment unbelievable—the broken drains and babaku s
mells of Golden Horde Street, his dirty apartment and the kif pipe, Yama and his stinking guardian, his long day in the White Chamber, Lake Bai and the singsongers on the boat, the synthesizer and the sisi warbling the melody “This Dewdrop World.”

  For that instant he could have joined Crux himself. Then he thought of Dzhun and he was paralyzed by indecision. As he hesitated, Dyeva turned to face him squarely and he heard the soft sound Phut! as she shot him through her coat.

  He felt—not pain, but an incredible, crushing pressure in his midsection. His upper body flew backward, almost separated from the rest of him and the back of his head struck the cold hard snowy ground. A last mechanical contraction of his right hand fired his pistol, sent the bullet up, up into the darkening overcast like a tiny missile. His left squeezed the red button, meaning: my job is finished, I have succeeded. Bring me home.

  Dyeva turned and hastened away, boots squeaking in the fresh snow. People were gawking at the wedding party and almost a minute passed before she heard, by now far behind her, a single scream. She would never know that the reason was not only the sight of a dead man lying horribly mutilated in the snow, but the fact that, even as someone spotted him, he disappeared, evaporated into the gathering darkness. Yama had kept his word.

  She plunged into the crowd before the Duma building, her mind running now on the scheduled arrival of the President and his cabinet for a debate on the Mongolian situation. Running also on the fact that such schedules were almost never kept. Running on the fact that she still had fifteen bullets, and that any one would be enough. Running on the importance of stopping this Minister Destruction that she had been hearing people on Ganesh curse since her childhood—the man who had given the order that ended their world.

  No, she didn’t believe in God any longer. But she had had to try once more to recapture her faith in the Cathedral of the Annunciation. Who could have imagined that she’d ever have a chance to pray there, in a building long since vaporized and its atoms embedded deep in the Kremlin Shield?