The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Jean-Paul had warned the records wouldn’t be accurate. But you hope. I went to Samburu North, where my search in England had last recorded Ten. No trace of her. The UNHCR warden, a grim little American woman, took me up and down the rows of tents. I looked at the faces and my tracker sat silent on my hip. I saw those faces that night in the ceiling, and for many nights after.

  “You expect to hit the prize first time?” Heino said as we bounced along the dirt track in an MSF Landcruiser to Don Dul.

  I had better luck in Don Dul, if you can call it that. Ten had definitely been here two months ago. But she had left eight days later. I saw the log in, the log out, but there was no record of where she had gone.

  “No shortage of camps either,” Heino said. He was a dour bastard. He couldn’t take me any further but he squared me an authorization to travel on Red Cross/ Crescent convoys, who did a five hundred mile run through the camps along the northern terminum. In two weeks I saw more misery than I ever thought humanity could take. I saw the faces and the hands and the bundles of scavenged things and I thought, why hold them here? What are they saving them from? Is it so bad in the Chaga? What is so terrible about people living long lives, being immune from sickness, growing extra layers in their brains? What is so frightening about people being able to go into that alien place, and take control of it, and make it into what they want?

  I couldn’t see the Chaga, it lay just below the southern horizon, but I was constantly aware of its presence, like they say people who have plates in their skulls always feel a slight pressure. Sometimes, when the faces let me sleep, I would be woken instead by a strange smell, not strong, but distinct; musky and fruity and sweaty, sexy, warm. It was the smell of the Chaga, down there, blowing up from the south.

  Tent to truck to camp to tent. My three weeks were running out and I had to arrange a lift back along the front line to Samburu and the flight to Mombasa. With three days left, I arrived in Eldoret, UNECTA’s Lake Victoria regional center. It gave an impression of bustle, the shops and hotels and cafés were busy, but the white faces and American accents and dress sense said Eldoret was a company town. The Rift Valley Hotel looked like heaven after eighteen days on the front line. I spent an hour in the pool trying to beam myself into the sky. A sudden rain-storm drove everyone from the water but me. I floated there, luxuriating in the raindrops splashing around me. At sunset I went down to the camps. They lay to the south of the town, like a line of cannon-fodder against the Chaga. I checked the records, a matter of form. No Tendeléo Bi. I went in anyway. And it was another camp, and after a time, anyone can become insulated to suffering. You have to. You have to book into the big hotel and swim in the pool and eat a good dinner when you get back; in the camps you have to look at the faces just as faces and refuse to make any connection with the stories behind them. The hardest people I know work in the compassion business. So I went up and down the faces and somewhere halfway down some row I remembered this toy Jean-Paul had given me. I took it out. The display was flashing green. There was a single word: lock.

  I almost dropped it.

  I thought my heart had stopped. I felt shot between the eyes. I forgot to breathe. The world reeled sideways. My fucking stupid fingers couldn’t get a precise reading. I ran down the row of tents, watching the figures. The digits told me how many meters I was to north and east. Wrong way. I doubled back, ducked right at the next opening and headed east. Both sets of figures were decreasing. I overshot, the cast reading went up. Back again. This row. This row. I peered through the twilight. At the far end was a group of people talking outside a tent lit by a yellow petrol lamp. I started to run, one eye on the tracker. I stumbled over guy-ropes, kicked cans, hurdled children, apologized to old women. The numbers clicked down, thirty five, thirty, twenty five meters … I could see this one figure in the group, back to me, dressed in purple combat gear. East zero, North twenty, eighteen … Short, female, Twelve, ten. Wore its hair in great soft spikes. Eight, six. I couldn’t make it past four. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I was shaking.

  Sensing me, the figure turned. The yellow light caught her.

  “Ten,” I said. I saw fifty emotions on that face. Then she ran at me and I dropped the scanner and I lifted her and held her to me and no words of mine, or anyone else’s, I think, can say how I felt then.

  NOW our lives and stories and places come together, and my tale moves to its conclusion.

  I believe that people and their feelings write themselves on space and time. That is the only way I can explain how I knew, even before I turned and saw him there in that camp, that it was Sean, that he had searched for me, and found me. I tell you, that is something to know that another person has done for you. I saw him, and it was like the world had set laws about how it was to work for me, and then suddenly it said, no. I break them now, for you Tendeléo, because it pleases me. He was impossible, he changed everything I knew, he was there.

  Too much joy weeps. Too much sorrow laughs.

  He took me back to his hotel. The staff looked hard at me as he picked up his keycard from the lobby. They knew what I was. They did not dare say anything. The white men in the bar also turned to stare. They too knew the meaning of the colors I wore.

  He took me to his room. We sat on the verandah with beer. There was a storm that night—there is a storm most nights, up in the high country—but it kept itself in the west among the Nandi Hills. Lightning crawled between the clouds, the distant thunder rattled our beer bottles on the iron table. I told Sean where I had been, what I had done, how I had lived. It was a story long in the telling. The sky had cleared, a new day was breaking by the time I finished it. We have always told each other stories, and each other’s stories.

  He kept his questions until the end. He had many, many of them.

  “Yes, I suppose, it is like the old slave underground railroads,” I answered one.

  “I still don’t understand why they try to stop people going in.”

  “Because we scare them. We can build a society in there that needs nothing from them. We challenge everything they believe. This is the first century we have gone into where we have no ideas, no philosophies, no beliefs. Buy stuff, look at stuff. That’s it. We are supposed to build a thousand years on that? Well, now we do. I tell you, I’ve been reading, learning stuff, ideas, politics. Philosophy. It’s all in there. There are information storage banks the size of skyscrapers, Sean. And not just our history. Other people, other races. You can go into them, you can become them, live their lives, see things through their senses. We are not the first. We are part of a long, long chain, and we are not the end of it. The world will belong to us; we will control physical reality as easily as computers control information.”

  “Hell, never mind the UN … you scare me, Ten!”

  I always loved it when he called me Ten. Il Primo, Top of the Heap, King of the Hill, A-Number-One.

  Then he said, “and your family?”

  “Little Egg is in a place called Kilandui. It’s full of weavers, she’s a weaver. She makes beautiful brocades. I see her quite often.”

  “And your mother and father?”

  “I’ll find them.”

  But to most of his questions, there was only one answer: “Come, and I will show you.” I left it to last. It rocked him as if he had been struck.

  “You are serious.”

  “Why not? You took me to your home once. Let me take you to mine. But first, it’s a year … And so so much …”

  He picked me up.

  “I like you in this combat stuff,” he said.

  We laughed a lot and remembered old things we had forgotten. We slowly shook off the rust and the dust, and it was good, and I remember the room maid opening the door and letting out a little shriek and going off giggling.

  Sean once told me that one of his nation’s greatest ages was built on those words, why not? For a thousand years Christianity had ruled England with the question: “Why?” Build a cathedral, invent a scien
ce, write a play, discover a new land, start a business: “why?” Then came the Elizabethans with the answer: “Why not?”

  I knew the old Elizabethan was thinking, why not? There are only numbers to go back to, and benefit traps, and an old, gray city, and an old, gray dying world, a safe world with few promises. Here there’s a world to be made. Here there’s a future of a million years to be shaped. Here there are a thousand different ways of living together to be designed, and if they don’t work, roll them up like clay and start again.

  I did not hurry Sean for his answer. He knew as well as I that it was not a clean decision. It was lose a world, or lose each other. These are not choices you make in a day. So, I enjoyed the hotel. One day I was having a long bath. The hotel had a great bathroom and there was a lot of free stuff you could play with, so I abused it. I heard Sean pick up the phone. I could not make out what he was saying, but he was talking for some time. When I came out he was sitting on the edge of the bed with the telephone beside him. He sat very straight and formal.

  “I called Jean-Paul,” he said. “I gave him my resignation.”

  Two days later, we set out for the Chaga. We went by matatu. It was a school holiday, the Peugeot Services were busy with children on their way back to their families. They made a lot of noise and energy. They looked out the corners of their eyes at us and bent together to whisper. Sean noticed this.

  “They’re talking about you,” Sean said.

  “They know what I am, what I do.”

  One of the schoolgirls, in a black and white uniform, understood our English. She fixed Sean a look. “She is a warrior,” she told him. “She is giving us our nation back.”

  We left most of the children in Kapsabet to change onto other matatus; ours drove on into the heart of the Nandi Hills. It was a high, green rolling country, in some ways like Sean’s England. I asked the driver to stop just past a metal cross that marked some old road death.

  “What now?” Sean said. He sat on the small pack I had told him was all he could take.

  “Now, we wait. They won’t be long.”

  Twenty cars went up the muddy red road, two trucks, a country bus and medical convoy went down. Then they came out of the darkness between the trees on the other side of the road like dreams out of sleep: Meji, Naomi and Hamid. They beckoned; behind them came men, women, children … entire families, from babes in arms to old men; twenty citizens, appearing one by one out of the dark, looking nervously up and down the straight red road, then crossing to the other side.

  I fived with Meji, he looked Sean up and down.

  “This is the one?”

  “This is Sean.”

  “I had expected something, um …”

  “Whiter?”

  He laughed. He shook hands with Sean and introduced himself. Then Meji took a tube out of his pocket and covered Sean in spray. Sean jumped back, choking.

  “Stay there, unless you want your clothes to fall off you when you get inside,” I said.

  Naomi translated this for the others. They found it very funny. When he had immunized Sean’s clothes, Meji sprayed his bag.

  “Now, we walk,” I told Sean.

  We spent the night in the Chiefs house in the village of Senghalo. He was the last station on our railroad. I know from my Dust Girl days you need as good people on the outside as the inside. Folk came from all around to see the black Englishman. Although he found being looked at intimidating, Sean managed to tell his story. I translated. At the end the crowd outside the Chiefs house burst into spontaneous applause and finger-clicks.

  “Aye, Tendeléo, how can I compete?” Meji half-joked with me.

  I slept fitfully that night, troubled by the sound of aircraft moving under the edge of the storm.

  “Is it me?” Sean said.

  “No, not you. Go back to sleep.”

  Sunlight through the bamboo wall woke us. While Sean washed outside in the bright, cold morning, watched by children curious to see if the black went all the way down, Chief and I tuned his shortwave to the UN frequencies. There was a lot of chatter in Klingon. You Americans think we don’t understand Star Trek?

  “They’ve been tipped off,” Chief said. We fetched the equipment from his souterrain. Sean watched Hamid, Naomi, Meri and I put on the communicators. He said nothing as the black-green knob of cha-plastic grew around the back of my head, into my ear, and sent a tendril to my lips. He picked up my staff.

  “Can I?”

  “It won’t bite you.”

  He looked closely at the fist-sized ball of amber at its head, and the skeleton outline of a sphere embedded in it.

  “It’s a buckyball,” I said. “The symbol of our power.”

  He passed it to me without comment. We unwrapped our guns, cleaned them, checked them and set off. We walked east that day along the ridges of the Nandi Hills, through ruined fields and abandoned villages. Helicopter engines were our constant companions. Sometimes we glimpsed them through the leaf cover, tiny in the sky like black mosquitoes. The old people and the mothers looked afraid. I did not want them to see how nervous they were making me. I called my colleagues apart.

  “They’re getting closer.”

  Hamid nodded. He was a quiet, thin twenty-two year old … Ethiopian skin, goatee, a political science graduate from the university of Nairobi.

  “We choose a different path every time,” he said. “They can’t know this.”

  “Someone’s selling us,” Meji said.

  “Wouldn’t matter. We pick one at random.”

  “Unless they’re covering them all.”

  In the afternoon we began to dip down toward the Rift Valley and terminum. As we wound our way down the old hunters’ paths, muddy and slippery from recent rain, the helicopter came swooping in across the hillside. We scrambled for cover. It turned and made another pass, so low I could see the light glint from the pilot’s heads-up visor.

  “They’re playing with us,” Hamid said. “They can blow us right off this hill any time they want.”

  “How?” Naomi asked. She said only what was necessary, and when.

  “I think I know,” Sean said. He had been listening a little away. He slithered down to join us as the helicopter beat over the hillside again, flailing the leaves, showering us with dirt and twigs. “This.” He tapped my forearm. “If I could find you, they can find you.”

  I pulled up my sleeve. The Judas chip seemed to throb under my skin, like poison.

  “Hold my wrist,” I said to Sean. “Whatever happens, don’t let it slip.”

  Before he could say a word, I pulled my knife. These things must be done fast. If you once stop to think, you will never do it. Make sure you have it straight. You won’t get another go. A stab down with the tip, a short pull, a twist, and the traitor thing was on the ground, greasy with my blood. It hurt. It hurt very much, but the blood had staunched, the wound was already closing.

  “I’ll just have to make sure not to lose you again,” Sean said.

  Very quietly, very silently, we formed up the team and one by one slipped down the hillside, out from under the eyes of the helicopter. For all I know, the stupid thing is up there still, keeping vigil over a dead chip. We slept under the sky that night, close together for warmth and on the third day we came to Tinderet and the edge of the Chaga.

  TEN had been leading us a cracking pace, as if she were impatient to put Kenya behind us. Since mid-morning, we had been making our way up a long, slow hill. I’d done some hill-walking, I was fit for it, but the young ones and the women with babies found it tough going. When I called for a halt, I saw a moment of anger cross Ten’s face. As soon as she could, we upped packs and moved on. I tried to catch up with her, but Ten moved steadily ahead of me until, just below the summit, she was almost running.

  “Shone!” she shouted back. “Come with me!”

  She ran up through the thinning trees to the summit. I followed, went bounding down a slight dip, and suddenly, the trees opened and I was on the edge
.

  The ground fell away at my feet into the Rift Valley, green on green on green, sweeping to the valley floor where the patterns of the abandoned fields could still be made out in the patchwork of yellows and buffs and earth tones. Perspective blurred the colors—I could see at least fifty miles—until, suddenly, breathtakingly, they changed. Browns and dry-land beiges blended into burgundies and rust reds, were shot through with veins of purple and white, then exploded into chaos, like a bed of flowers of every conceivable color, a jumble of shapes and colors like a mad coral reef, like a box of kiddie’s plastic toys spilled out on a Chinese rug. It strained the eyes, it hurt the brain. I followed it back, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. A sheer wall, deep red, rose abruptly out of the chaotic landscape, straight up, almost as high as the escarpment I was standing on. It was not a solid wall, it looked to me to be made up of pillars or, I thought, tree trunks. They must have been of titanic size to be visible from this distance. They opened into an unbroken, flat crimson canopy. In the further distance, the flat roof became a jumble of dark greens, broken by what I can only describe as small mesas, like the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming or the old volcanoes in Puy de Dome. But these glittered in the sun like glass. Beyond them, the landscape was striped like a tiger, yellow and dark brown, and formations like capsizing icebergs, pure white, lifted out of it. And beyond that, I lost the detail, but the colors went on and on, all the way to the horizon.

  I don’t know how long I stood, looking at the Chaga. I lost all sense of time. I became aware at some point that Ten was standing beside me. She did not try to move me on, or speak. She knew that the Chaga was one of these things that must just be experienced before it can be interpreted. One by one the others joined us. We stood in a row along the bluffs, looking at our new home.

  Then we started down the path to the valley below.

  Half an hour down the escarpment, Meji up front called a halt.

  “What is it?” I asked Ten. She touched her fingers to her communicator, a half-eggshell of living plastic unfolded from the headset and pressed itself to her right eye.